


Castle on a Cloud

by mumuinc



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: BAMF Regulus Black, Child Abuse, Complicated Relationships, Gen, Harry Potter Never Went to Hogwarts, Magic isn't real, Morally Ambiguous Character, Regulus Black Lives, Sirius Black Lives, but not really
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:22:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27474220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumuinc/pseuds/mumuinc
Summary: When Harry Potter turns eleven, no letter comes. Instead, the worst of his nightmares are only about to start: Uncle Vernon has decided to send him to St Brutus's Secure Facility for Incurably Criminal Boys.
Relationships: Regulus Black & Harry Potter, Regulus Black & Sirius Black, Sirius Black & Harry Potter
Comments: 23
Kudos: 58





	1. Dr R A White

There is a castle on a cloud  
I like to go there in my sleep  
Aren’t any floors for me to sweep  
Not in my castle on a cloud

From _Les Miserables_

* * *

The room was white and the smell of antiseptic overpowering. It was small, rectangular, with a row of shelves affixed to the bare white wall hovering just above shoulder-height for an average-sized man. There were books on psychology and pediatrics stacked neatly on the shelves, bookended by, funnily enough, two small wood sculptures of sleeping dragons. The sculptures were the size of Action Man figurines and were about the only thing interesting to look at in the spartan room, for the detail on them was astounding, even from where the boy stood, hovering near the open white door. In the center of the room, just in front of the shelves, a large table of pale wood, unadorned and topped with a sheet of glass, and behind the table sat a man in a crisp grey suit.

He looked up from the papers stacked on the plain black leatherette blotter in the center of the table and smiled. He was young and rather attractive, with medium black hair cut and styled neatly, parted on the right, where a bit of fringe curled gently over his high forehead. His brows were straight and thick and lent a bit of fierceness to his otherwise gentle-looking blue-grey eyes, and the thin sweep of the pale pink of his mouth ended with a single dimple on his right cheek. He looked like he belonged in the pages of one of those pulpy magazines that Aunt Petunia read than in the antiseptic white room that was the guidance counselor’s office in St Brutus’s Academy for Troubled Youths, though there was something odd about the way his grey suit jacket fitted him around the shoulders, like on one side, there wasn’t enough meat to hold up the stiff fabric.

At the center of the table, a small black metal plaque stated his name: Dr R A White, a fitting name to match the almost unnatural paleness to his skin, sharp contrast to the darkness of the rest of his features. The plaque had a small penholder on the right end, from which a silver pen was securely affixed with a thin chain.

Dr White’s smile widened almost imperceptibly as a small frisson of something like recognition entered the clarity of his eyes. He looked very personable, and not at all like the other teachers in the school.

“Hello, Harry,” Dr White greeted as he stood behind his desk. He was tall and thin, and there was a smidgen of awkwardness in his movement as he pushed his chair back, and gestured for the boy to enter. “Please come in and close the door behind you.”

Harry Potter squared his shoulders. He’d been at St Brutus’s for six months now and had so far managed to stay out of trouble, despite what Dudley told Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon at home when Harry had come home for Christmas hols that was even more miserable than the Christmases of years past. Dudley wouldn’t know anything anyway, since he didn’t go to St Brutus. At the start of September, Uncle Vernon had driven Dudley to Smeltings Academy, a fancy school where people of good stock went to get a normal, quality education. People like Harry, according to Uncle Vernon, belonged in St Brutus, where the dregs of society, the freaks who needed their strange and fanciful ideas and belligerent nature beaten out of them, were abandoned until they became normal enough to reenter civilized society.

St Brutus was aschool for troubled youths, though Harry had read somewhere that it was a bit more like an outpatient sort of juvenile secure facility for young people who ran afoul with the law, something that confused Harry quite a bit when he’d first arrived for he had never been arrested nor garnered any sort of attention from law enforcement, even on that one occasion when Uncle Vernon had hit him in the face so hard, he’d lost a couple of his baby teeth and had to be driven to the hospital by Aunt Petunia.

Everyone in Harry’s class had some trouble, either at home or on the streets, and nearly all of them had been sent at least once to Dr White’s office. Some of the boys who’d emerged from this office were white faced and sweaty once they came out, and many of them had never repeated whatever infraction it was that had landed them in Dr White’s office in the first place. Harry couldn’t quite fathom why; Dr White was a nice-looking man and he didn’t look at all fierce like Ms Wormwood, who taught English and kept a long metal stick that she used to rap boys who were caught napping in her class, or Mr Bootleby, who taught Maths and was known to throw the chalkboard erasers at boys who got the answers wrong when forced into class recitation. Dr White didn’t seem like he kept anything in his office with which he could hurt his students, though he might keep it hidden in the drawers of his massive desk. And anyway, Harry had seen Joshua Sparks stab Eric Benson’s hand once with a pen, when Benson stole a candy bar from Joshua’s stash, so maybe Dr White didn’t need metal sticks or chalkboard erasers to beat submission and sense into the boys who came into his office.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Harry said quietly. Dr White gestured for him to take a seat and he gingerly sat himself on one of two the uncomfortable metal chairs in front of Dr White’s desk.

“Do you know why you’re here today, Harry?” Dr White asked. His voice was calm, clear, and he sounded nothing like Ms Wormwood, who had a flat working class accent, or Mr Bootleby, who was Scottish. Jeffrey May, who’d landed three visits in Dr White’s office in the six months since the school year started and was Dr White’s most frequent visitor in Harry’s year, said he sounded very posh. Harry wouldn’t know since he’d never met anyone who was posh. The boys in St Brutus mostly came from working class backgrounds, and Harry was probably one of the very few who came from a strictly middle class upbringing.

He shook his head. “No, sir.”

He hadn’t done anything to land himself in the guidance counselor’s office. In fact, he hadn’t done anything to warrant being in St Brutus. He’d done his chores, _every_ chore in the Dursley household that an eleven-year-old could conceivably physically do, and he’d kept his head down, and he’d done the same ever since Uncle Vernon had driven him to St Brutus and dumped him there. He’d kept his head down and tried his very best to achieve passable grades so that his teachers would have no reason to write Aunt Petunia. He’d even achieved a few gold stars in sciences, and the hall monitor, Mr Ambrose, told him once that he was neat and proper and decent, and all that a young man should be.

Dr White smiled a little and nodded, and plucked a sheet of paper from his stack and handed it to Harry. Harry saw that it was one of the papers that Ms Wormwood had assigned for the first year class to do, a story-telling exercise to gauge the boys’ writing skills. It had been one of the very first papers Harry had ever worked on and he remembered how his hand had ached from writing such a long essay. At the top of the sheet, his grade was marked in sharp red ink: A+. There was a scribble of something at the corner, but Harry’s eyesight was terrible and his glasses were a few years out of date and Ms Wormwood’s handwriting was unbearably tiny.

“Ms Wormwood says that you have a talent in writing, and a gift in story-telling,” Dr White said, his voice still quiet and even. “Can you tell me a little more about the story you’ve written for this exercise?”

Harry blinked as he stared down at his own squiggly handwriting. Because his eyesight was so bad, his handwriting was terrible, and while he had no problem writing out his thoughts, it was the rereading of his own handwriting that was proving to be a little difficult. Harry squinted down at the paper.

“It’s a story about a boy who went to a magic school called Hogwarts, sir,” he said once he’d picked out some of the words in the massive block of squiggly text on the paper.

“Right… Hogwarts,” Dr White said slowly, deliberately. Harry’s eyes flew up from the paper to stare at the man. His blue eyes were uncharacteristically bright, intense, as he looked Harry in the eye and it felt a little bit like having his skin peeled back, layer by later, so sharp and intense was his stare. There was a minute quiver in the corner of his lips, like he was itching to say something but was forcing himself to say something else.

Dr White was silent as he stared at Harry for a long time, before speaking up again at length. “How did you come up with such an interesting story, Harry?”

Harry frowned a little. His head was starting to ache from all the staring Dr White was doing, and his hand came up to rub at the strangely-shaped jagged scar he had on his forehead. The scar was a remnant of an accident when he was a baby. Aunt Petunia had told him once that he and his parents had been in a car collision and his parents had died there, while Harry only sustained the injury to his forehead. Sometimes, when his head hurt, his scar would itch, like it was still a living thing, like it hadn’t fully recovered, even though it really should have, since that accident had happened when he was barely two years old. Dr White stared at him intensely as he rubbed his scar.

“I…” Harry licked his lips and wondered if he should tell the man what was truly going on his head. Dr White so far hadn’t hit him, hadn’t belittled him, and best of all, he hadn’t written to Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon about Harry being a freak, something which Mr Bootleby had done once, Harry was sure, when Mr Bootleby was punishing Eric and another boy, Dominic Talbot, for vandalizing the desks in the Maths classroom, not that any of it could actually be attributed to Eric or Dominic, since there was so much vandalism on all the classroom furniture in St Brutus. There were scratches made with things that Harry could only imagine had to be box cutters, and deep gouges spotted with blue ink. There was a desk in Ms Goldberg’s classroom that had a drawing of a penis carved into the cheap wood, with the words “Percy Jackson was here” right next to it. Mr Bootleby had been about to grab the meter stick leaning against the chalkboard to rap Eric and Dominic’s hands for the vandalism when suddenly, all the papers on his desk were swept up in the air and scattered all around the classroom.

There had been no wind to have caused that since the windows were all closed and it was storming outside, and Mr Bootleby had his ugly grey rock paperweight weighing down his papers. Harry wasn’t sure how he made it happen, only that he did, because he didn’t want Eric and Dominic to be beaten with the meter stick so soon after Ms Wormwood had rapped all their hands with _her_ metal stick for their terrible handwriting. No one had connected him with the incident, though, and that was good enough for Harry. No one in St Brutus knew about any of the strange things that had been happening around him since he was a child, and Harry would definitely like to keep it that way.

Dr White was still waiting for his answer, so Harry cleared his throat a little and swallowed. There was no use telling Dr White that what he’d written… these were things he _knew,_ things that have already happened. He knew it in his blood, in his bones, and he knew it with a conviction that nothing and no one could shake from him because he’d _seen_ it. Oh not seen as in witnessed it, but _seen_ it, in his mind’s eye. He wasn’t entirely sure how that had happened, only that it did and most of the time, Harry keep it all hushed up. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon despised when Harry said anything that would point to him not being normal, and Dudley made fun of him all the time for being a freak, but he hadn’t been called such since he’d entered St Brutus, and he thought that for a story-telling exercise in class, it would have made for a good story. In any case, he’d never written that the little boy in the story was himself, even though in his Vision, it really was him. But if he told this to Dr White, the good doctor might think he was crazy, just like that time when he’d told his English primary school teacher that there’d be a giant of a man who would come visit him and tell him he had magic. _She’d_ called Aunt Petunia and told Aunt Petunia that at nine years old, Harry was too old to have an imaginary friend. Aunt Petunia had Not Been Happy and had sent Harry to weed her flower bushes until sundown, and had not given him supper. Then Uncle Vernon came home and locked him in his cupboard until well after lunch time the following day. Harry had had to miss school then because he was shaking so much from hunger.

No, he couldn’t tell this to Dr White, so the only plausible way he could get around this was to lie.

“I dreamed about it, sir,” he said quietly, hoping against hope that Dr White wouldn’t ask any more questions. He was still staring intensely at Harry, and the twitch at the corner of his mouth was more pronounced. Harry could see that there was a small tremor in his hands that he had folded on the desk over his papers. His eyes were so large as he stared that Harry could see all the whites and it made him look slightly deranged.

Abruptly, Dr White dropped his gaze, his eyes blinking rapidly the way one did when they had been staring for too long and had to banish the afterimage of what they had been staring at, and he nodded.

“You dreamed about this school,” he repeated, his voice sounded thoughtful. “Tell me, Harry, have you dreamed of other similar things?”

Harry’s eyes widened and he thought rapidly back if he had ever told anyone in school about the things he had Seen, things like magic and witchcraft, and a massive castle for a school, about going to this fanciful street in London called Diagon Alley to buy supplies needed for the magic school, about a bank run by goblins, and a cavernous vault underground where he had seen mounds and mounds of gold coins and told that this was his inheritance from his parents, because his parents were magic and they were heroes and they were known the world over for having fought a wizard that everyone in this magical world had called You Know Who.

Dr White was back to staring at him and his eyes had narrowed when Harry’s thoughts drifted to this magical conflict he’d been told about in his Vision. Harry purposefully lowered his gaze so that he wasn’t looking into Dr White’s unnerving blue eyes that were shining with a fierce burnished light, and he shook his head firmly.

“No, sir.”

Dr White was silent again for a long moment, before he dropped his gaze and looked down at the papers on his blotter. “Harry, I have a record here of some of your experiences in your previous school,” he said abruptly as he flipped through the papers. “There’s a note here from one of your previous teachers that you’d turned his hair blue once when he made you write lines.”

Harry shook his head vigorously. Yes, he knew he’d done that but then he also knew that he didn’t _mean_ to do that. Strange things just… happened around him a lot. In his Vision, the magical people had called it accidental magic. But here, in the real world, there was no such thing as magic, and things like turning his teacher’s hair blue wasn’t something little boys were capable of doing.

“I didn’t—“ He cast around helplessly. It wasn’t his fault! He didn’t mean to do any of those strange things that happened around him!

On the bookshelf, some of the books started to shake and tremble despite the two wooden dragon figurines keeping them secured and snug.

Dr White smiled again, this time, his smile wasn’t strained, and the tremor in his hands had stopped as he reached across the table and patted Harry on his shoulder. “Harry, please, don’t stress yourself over this.”

He stood and rounded the desk and Harry hazarded a glance up to see that Dr White had moved to the other chair on the opposite side of the desk, beside the one where Harry was sat. He crouched on the floor and Harry could see that his linen trousers were perfectly, impeccably pressed, and his hands were outstretched towards Harry, but not touching him.

“Listen, I’ve gone through your file a number of times since you were enrolled to St Brutus. Your previous school had much to say about you being a very lonely boy around which many strange things have happened, and I’d like to…” he paused and cast about for a moment for the right word. “I’d like to help you with understanding that.”

Harry frowned, confused at the kindly tone Dr White’s posh voice had taken. “Help me? Is there something wrong with me?”

Dr White pressed his lips into a thin line like he was trying to control a grimace from forming. “Of course there’s nothing wrong with you, young man. Whatever would make you think that?”

Harry thought back to all the times that Uncle Vernon called him a freak. He thought back to all the times when Aunt Petunia told him he wasn’t normal, and all the times that Dudley had incited his friends against him because he’d told them that there was something infinitely wrong about Harry. Dr White, who had been watching his face intently, frowned even as Harry shook his head.

“But if there was nothing wrong with me, why would I need your help, sir?”

“Have your parents told you that there was something wrong with you?” Dr White asked instead.

“No,” he said softly. “My parents are dead.”

Dr White didn’t look surprised. Maybe they had that information in his school file. “Yes, of course. It was your… uncle—a Mr Dursley, was it?—that brought you here.”

Harry nodded. In that moment, there was nothing he wished for more desperately than to have his parents alive. Maybe then he wouldn’t have turned out to be such a freak.

“None of that now,” Dr White said, interrupting his train of thoughts. He stood and gestured for Harry to stand with him. “I’d like to… be able to work with you on these things. Your other teachers tell me that you’ve been doing well in your schoolwork, but that you lacked the confidence to do more than passably well in your classes.”

Harry hung his head. He really had no excuse for his lackluster marks. Dudley wasn’t even here now to beat him up for having higher marks, and it wasn’t like St Brutus was going to mail his report card to the Dursleys. That wasn’t the kind of school St Brutus was.

“Are you going to write my aunt and uncle for my marks?”

Dr White shook his head. “No, I believe there’s no need for that. However, I do think that there’s a need for you to, ah, let’s say that you need to work through some of the things that have been going on in your head.”

Harry glared up at him. He thought back to that time on Dudley’s birthday during the summer when Aunt Petunia took them to the zoo and allowed Harry to tag along. He’d talked to a snake in the reptile display that day, and then the glass keeping the snake in disappeared and Dudley fell into the reptile cage, and the snake had been so excited about making its way back to Brazil. That had _definitely_ happened, and yet nobody had believed him when he’d recounted the story in one of Ms Wormwood’s classes on story-telling about strange occurrences. Was he calling Harry a liar? “I’ve not been imagining things, sir.”

“Of course not,” said Dr White, rather patronizingly, in Harry’s opinion. “But that isn’t to say that other people believe you when you say that things happened to you that they find, shall we say, implausible.”

“It’s not my fault that they happen,“ Harry muttered, his mouth curling into a mulish expression that, inexplicably, had Dr White smiling almost fondly at him. “They just do.”

“Ah, yes, I do know that,” Dr White said. “Many strange things happen that people can’t really explain, and perhaps it’s because their small minds cannot hope to fathom what these things mean. They are, after all, only muggles,” he added softly, pensively.

Harry goggled up at the guidance counselor. He’d heard that word before, many times, in that Vision. “Sir?”

Dr White shook his head as if to dispel something that was going on in the room that appeared only to him. “Nothing, Harry. Pay that no mind.” He smiled again, more assured than fond this time. “As I said, I’d like for us to have a few more regular meetings after this. Would that be all right with you?”

Harry scowled. “I haven’t done anything to need to have regular guidance meetings, sir.”

“No, you haven’t, of course. You’ve been a perfectly well-behaved boy, not like…” He stopped talking, his gaze once again turning fond, before he moved back behind the desk. “No, you definitely did not do anything wrong to warrant additional guidance meetings, but I would like to get to know you better. Perhaps, outside of your regular class hours?”

“Why?” he asked, suspicious. Dr White was the first adult, no, the first person who’d actually said that he wanted to get to know Harry. No one, not even the other boys in his class, ever wanted to get to know him or become his friend. Why would this man, this teacher, want to? Didn’t adults prefer to keep company among themselves, especially outside of Harry’s class hours and therefore outside of Dr White’s working hours?

“You, ah, remind me of someone,” Dr White said, “someone I knew very well.” He closed Harry’s file and continued to smile at him until Harry felt unnerved. “Would you tell me what your parents names were, Harry? Your file doesn’t state it.”

“James and Lily Potter, sir,” Harry said, even more suspicious than before. No one, not even Aunt Petunia, ever wanted to talk about Harry’s parents, and Harry’s mother was her sister. Why did Dr White need to know who his parents were? Did he know Harry’s parents?

“Yes, I did know them,” Dr White said, as if in answer to his thoughts. “Though perhaps not quite as well as I thought I would have, at any rate.”

“So you _do_ know them.”

“I did, yes,” said Dr White, a tad ruefully. “You might not know it, since I doubt your aunt has told you, but I went to the same school as your parents.”

“You did?”

Dr White nodded, that swooping cowlick curl over his forehead dropping a lock at obscured his eyes for a moment, before he carelessly brushed it back. “Yes, and I hope you would permit me some time to tell you about them.”

“Would you, sir?” Harry asked, his voice soft with wonder, his heart skipping a beat. His parents had gone to Hogwarts, he knew it because the giant of a man in his Vision had told him so. He’d told him that his parents were magic. Did that mean that Dr White—

“I certainly will. On Saturday, perhaps? After your morning football game?”

Harry stood, his eyes so bright, he could feel the wibbly-wobbly prickle of tears threatening to push through the corner of his eyelids. “Yes, sir, I’ll be here!”

Dr White’s smile seemed sad as he nodded, tinged with a strange sort of bitterness. “You look so much like him, you know, like father.”

Harry could barely contain the tattoo beat of his heart in his excitement. “I look like my father?”

Dr White’s eyes dropped to the desk and he blinked rapidly as if there was something caught in his eyes. “No, not like—I mean like… Never mind. I’ll see you on Saturday, then, Harry.”

Harry had never wanted to hug anyone like he wanted to hug Dr White now. He’d never even hugged anyone in his life before and he wanted to do it to Dr White. “Thank you, sir!” he cried fervently as he backed from the desk and made his way towards the door. “I’ll be here.”

When he closed the door to the guidance counselor’s office behind him, Dr White’s sad smile warred internally with the burst of unbearable excitement that came with having met someone who knew his parents, someone who could tell him about his parents beyond the disparaging remarks that Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had told him about his father being a layabout and his mother being a terrible woman. Maybe they were wrong, maybe Dr White knew more about them. He _had_ to know more, wouldn’t he, if he’d gone to school with Harry’s parents?

He couldn’t wait for Saturday, and he skipped in the corridors all the way back to his locker to gather his things and set off for home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic has a couple of different tropes in the fandom that I intend to explore, the foremost of which is the Regulus Black escaped the cave trope, and the magic isn't real and everything that happened in the books is all in Harry's head theory, which is supremely depressing, but a story I wanted to write anyway. Obviously, there are overt hints of magic still in the narration, but is that really real given that Harry's the POV we follow? We'll have to see as the story progresses, I suppose.
> 
> This fic is inspired by the [Harry Potter Theory youtube video](https://youtu.be/sMlwvcZuhas) theorizing that the events of the books are all in Harry's head, and that the abuse he suffered has somehow caused some sort of psychotic break where he ends up truly believing it. I have to say that I am no mental health expert so I can't really couch any of these ideas in medical terms. I try to do a bit of research with what I write, but ultimately, this is fanfic, so don't expect any true levels of realism in Harry's sessions with Dr White, especially since I know nothing of psychological and psychiatric practices in the early nineties (dude, I was a kid then!) and it's not easy researching medical methods from two decades past.
> 
> The Regulus lives plot line is heavily inspired by [Secrets & Keepers - Collision Course](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16045178/chapters/37456934). That fic is awesome, especially in terms of backstory plotting.


	2. A Prison Beyond Walls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very severe trigger warning in this chapter: graphic and rather horrifically realistic description of child abuse. Please heed this warning if it triggers you, this fic (or at least this chapter in the fic) isn't for you, and you really ought to click the fuck away since I have it up in the tags. I can't stress this enough.

Look down, look down  
Don't look 'em in the eye  
Look down, look down  
You're here until you die

From _Les Miserables_

* * *

Asking for permission for a Saturday out to go back to school was a little like pulling teeth in the Dursley household. For Harry anyway, because he was sure if Dudley were to ask Uncle Vernon, his uncle would have driven his cousin to wherever it was he wanted to be and waited on him hand and foot until he was good and ready to go home whenever he chose. Harry wasn’t so lucky, being the horrid unwanted child that the Dursleys at first treated like some shameful secret they had to hide in the cupboard under the stairs (not an exaggeration, since that had been Harry’s bedroom from time immemorial), and later, when he was older and could be ordered about, the unpaid help.

The bus that took him from the stop half a kilometer from St Brutus’s gates to Little Whinging had been crowded and stifling. Harry had never stayed in school for longer than he had to and the meeting with Dr White had taken far more time than he’d expected. It was rush hour by the time he’d reached the bus stop and the driver had nearly shut the bus door in his face as the swell of people had been rather intimidating, and the driver had only let Harry on because he’d looked skinny and small and bedraggled and younger than the eleven years of his actual age. He’d wedged himself in a small corner just behind the driver and consequently, he smelled rather like the swath of unwashed masses in the bus. Aunt Petunia had taken one look at him when he stepped into the lawn and ordered him to wash down in the shed in the back before stepping inside, not exactly a small mercy considering the spring was cold as hell freezing over.

Dudley was in the living room, the telly blaring robotic sounds of some cartoon on the telly. There was a stack of books and notebooks on the coffee table that suggested he should probably have been doing his homework instead of lounging on the sofa. Harry paid him no attention as he slunk towards his cupboard, thankful to get the backbreaking load of his school bag off his back. From the kitchen, Aunt Petunia screeched at him to get a move on and get started on dinner since he’d already missed the afternoon weeding that he should have done had he not been in that strange meeting with Dr White.

Harry’s good mood from Dr White’s promise to talk to him about his parents had not quite dissipated yet. His blood was still thrumming with excitement of Dr White’s promise to tell him about the sort of people they were beyond that his father was a useless layabout and his mother no better, and that they had been awful terrible people for getting themselves killed and saddling Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon with an ungrateful, useless freak of a brat like himself, etc ad nauseam with the insults to Harry’s person. If Dr White had gone to school with his parents, Harry was sure he had to know _some_ good things about them, hadn’t he?

So hopeful, he changed out of his uniform, careful folding the grey polo shirt, the drab grey ascot and the muddy brown trousers on the makeshift camp bed that he had in his cupboard. He would still have to wash his uniform tonight and stick them behind the boiler or the refrigerator if he wanted to be able to wear it again tomorrow. Aunt Petunia had only gotten him one set of school clothes, and he wasn’t interested in having Mr Ambrose lecture him for twenty minutes and threaten him with a hiding if he wasn’t in the appropriate school dress the next day.

So dressed, he took his uniform out, trudged upstairs to empty the laundry basket in Dudley’s room, and took his cousin’s sweaty, disgusting clothes out to the washing machine in the laundry room. Both his and Dudley’s clothes were machine washable, but Aunt Petunia wouldn’t allow him to wash his in with Dudley because she told him his clothes would bleed dye over Dudley’s perfect school clothes, so he set his aside once the washer was started, and moved back to the kitchen.

The defrosted chicken on the counter was already cleaned and dressed, but there were potatoes to be peeled, celery to be washed and chopped, and asparagus to be blanched. Aunt Petunia set him to work on the potatoes, which he peeled and then handed off back to her for seasoning, and then he popped the chicken into the oven and set the timer, no mean feat for an eleven-year-old as scrawny as Harry, for an entire trussed up chicken was heavier than it looked, especially when it was placed in a large heavy glass bowl, and swimming in garlic and olive oil. The preheated oven presented an especially tricky thing to manage, and when Harry was eight and had first been tasked with preparing dinner, he’d banged his elbow on the side of the oven while attempting to shove the chicken in. He still had a massive scar from where he’d suffered second degree burns there. It was a little less tricky now that Harry had gained better muscle control of his arms (all that pulling and climbing trees to get away from Dudley and his gang of friends whenever they decided to indulge in a spot of Harry-baiting had to have been useful for _something_ ).

He was still too short to reach up the pot over the stove properly and had to pull up a stool so he could watch the water boil to blanch the asparagus. When that was done, he pulled up the oven mitts next and took out the glass tray with the chicken to turn it over and to place the seasoned potatoes around the edges to roast them with the chicken, since Aunt Petunia had left the kitchen already for her late afternoon soap operas on the telly.

There was still about twenty minutes before the chicken would be ready, so he went back outside to the laundry room to get Dudley’s clothes out of the washer to hang them out. Number 4, like all the other houses on Privet Drive, had clotheslines inside the laundry room, to fully air dry clothes straight out of the washer. Aunt Petunia had taught him when he was four that using the dryer on the linen and cottons of Dudley’s school things resulted in the clothes shrinking too fast, though Harry wasn’t sure if that was entirely true or if Dudley just grew fatter than his uniforms could manage to keep him for a full year.

Harry’s own clothes went into the washer next, and _his_ didn’t need to be spared from the dreaded dryer, since Harry was tiny and his school things were massive, what with them being Dudley’s castoffs from primary school, just dyed to match the colors for St Brutus. He had to ration the amount of detergent used on his clothes or Aunt Petunia would catch him using More Than He Was Allowed, a rule covering everything that Harry was allowed to consume in the Dursley household. He’d learned this rule when he was five and first tasked to manage his own soiled clothes, and because he had been a stupid toddler then, he hadn’t known how to measure, and his backside had smarted for days on end when Aunt Petunia had discovered him dumping half the container of detergent into the washer and had smacked his rear end repeatedly with a broomstick until the meaning of 1 scoop of the powder detergent was etched evermore into the skin of his arse. That had been a terrible day, week, whatever. Harry had had a terrible time sitting down with his arse so sore.

The oven timer went off around the same time as Uncle Vernon’s BMW roared into the driveway, and Harry had to hurry to get the chicken and the potatoes out and onto the dinner table, and then get the plates and cutlery. Up until he was seven, Uncle Vernon had allowed him to eat at the table with his family, but after one fateful visit from Aunt Marge the summer he turned eight and Ripper had nearly bitten his leg off when he reached for a tiny bit of pudding for afters, Harry ate his meals in the kitchen, while the Dursleys were in the dining room. He wasn’t allowed to eat before the Dursleys, of course, or the food presentation wouldn’t be perfect, so he plated everything up neatly and left it all on the table, before going back to the laundry room.

By the time he could hear Dudley whining for a fifth serving of pudding, his own laundry had been washed and dried and ironed (there’d been a different burning misadventure there when he first learned how to iron clothes when he was six, and he didn’t want to dwell on the way that he’d burned nearly all the skin off his palms when he’d dropped the iron. His hands still twinged every time he thought of that.) After dinner was the best time to ply Uncle Vernon with dessert and wine to ask for permission to be out on a Saturday.

Usually, when there were school events that needed attending outside of regular school days, the teachers would send him a permission slip for parents or guardians to sign, but since Harry wasn’t meeting Dr White on an official capacity, there had been none of that. Still, he couldn’t just disappear from the house on a Saturday morning, because that’s usually when he had to mow the lawn and weed the flower beds (an endless, thankless task, where Harry was concerned.)

He broached the subject as he started to clear away the table and set aside the meager amount of food he’d be allowed for dinner.

“Aunt Petunia, Uncle Vernon, I have to go back to school on Saturday morning to meet a teacher,” he said quietly, just as Aunt Petunia was cooing indulgently at Dudley as she gave him his sixth serving of pudding. There was maybe half a teaspoon of the pudding left in the dessert tray.

Aunt Petunia’s thin, horsey face turned pinched at the suggestion that her flowerbeds wouldn’t be weeded. “What’s this about?”

“Is this extra school work, boy?” Uncle Vernon demanded as he poured himself a healthy measure of the dinner port. “Why do you degenerates require extra schoolwork when your school should just be beating the freak out of you?”

Harry pressed his lips so he wouldn’t talk back. “It isn’t school work. I need to meet with the guidance counselor.”

“Oh ho! Sounds like that school of yours has finally caught on to what a troublesome freak you are. Are you in trouble, boy?”

Harry shook his head vigorously, shrinking back a little, knowing that a question like that was usually followed by a smack in the face. “No, no—“

“Do they cane you there when they catch you not completing your homework?” Dudley asked snidely, his voice muffled by the truly revolting amount of pudding he’d shoveled into his mouth.

Harry caught himself staring in revulsion and feeling his stomach churn before he looked away. “No, Dr White er… he wanted to discuss my, er—what’s in my head.”

“Your freakishness, you mean,” Uncle Vernon declared. “A doctor, eh? What sort of namby-pamby doctor does this school have working for them that you need a weekend meeting? Are you sick, boy?”

“Er, no sir,” Harry said, skittering away with the tiny amount of chicken scraps and potatoes in his plate lest Dudley decide he wanted the little amount of food Harry had left to eat. “Dr White is a psych—psychologist.”

“Sick in the head, then,” Uncle Vernon said, sneering. “Well, does your school send a permission slip for me to sign?”

Harry shook his head again. “No, sir. Dr White didn’t give me one.”

Aunt Petunia narrowed her eyes at him. “Then how can we be sure this is official school work?”

Harry bit his lip, hard to keep himself from crying. It suddenly felt so hopeless that he would be able to get out of even one Saturday morning of weeding and mowing the lawn, long enough for him to hear some morsel of information about his parents, and he was _not_ going to cry in front of Uncle Vernon or Dudley, especially not over things he’d lived long enough not knowing anyway, but he found himself opening his mouth and pleading for it anyway.

“Please, Aunt Petunia! It’s just one Saturday, I can weed the garden in the afternoon! Dr White said he’ll tell me about—“ He stopped talking abruptly, horrified that he’d been about to tell the Dursleys that his school counselor had known his parents. If there was one thing that was taboo on the dinner table, it was talk of Harry’s parents. Uncle Vernon usually went apoplectic at any mention of Harry’s dad, and Aunt Petunia became pinched and incredibly frosty at the mention of Harry’s mum, which was why Harry had never heard anything about his parents apart from what awful people they were, and that was only because no one could really stop Aunt Marge from running her mouth once she’d had a bit too much of her evening sherry on the weekends she was over.

Aunt Petunia narrowed her eyes even further, her beady blue gaze sharpening at the look of horror on Harry’s face. “That doctor said what?”

“Nothing!” Harry cried and shrank away, still clutching his plate of dinner scraps. “Nothing, Aunt Petunia! He didn’t say anything!”

She clamped her mouth shut for a moment, her thin lips pressing even thinner so that the bit of lipstick she wore smudged out of her lip line, and she would have looked comical, but Harry dared not laugh at the sight for fear of aggravating his relatives further.

“You’re not to go out this Saturday,” she declared. “You already came in late today and dinner would have been late if I hadn’t prepared the food before you’d come in.”

Uncle Vernon stood up and towered over Harry. “You heard the lady, boy.” He snatched the plate away from Harry and dumped it with the rest of the dirty dishes on the counter. “Into the cupboard now with you! And no dinner!”

So saying, Uncle Vernon shoved him away from the dining room towards the cupboard under the stairs in the living room. Harry tried one last ditch effort to convince them even has Uncle Vernon grabbed him by the neck of his shirt. He’d grown too big now for Uncle Vernon to grab him by the scruff of his neck and carry him to the cupboard, so he managed to twist around for a bit, pleading with the man.

“Please! It’s just one weekend morning!”

He didn’t mean for it to happen, as with all of the strange funny things that happened around him, but just as Uncle Vernon was shoving him out of the dining room, the half-empty glass of port on the table exploded, shattering and spraying wine and little bits of glass everywhere. Aunt Petunia let out a tiny scream at the sound of glass breaking, but Dudley, who had still been at the table, poking at the dregs of pudding in the empty dessert tray, had a hand outstretched past the wine glass and tiny bits of glass embedded into his cousin’s fat hands. Dudley let out a horrific cry as he clutched his hand, now bleeding from tiny cuts where the glass winked in the warm light of the Dursley’s dining room ambient lighting.

Harry’s eyes widened in horror as he tried to skitter away from Uncle Vernon’s grip, but the man’s meaty fist twisted into the neck of his shirt sharply, so much so that the fabric cut into Harry’s neck, making him gasp even as he tried to get away.

“Why you little freak!”

Harry wasn’t sure what he hoped to accomplish in trying to shove the Vernon’s massive bulk away because his scrawny eleven-year-old build was no match for him and there was very little he could do but steel himself as Uncle Vernon’s free hand swung back into a meaty fist that smashed into the side of his face, and though he hadn’t quite lost consciousness after the blow, he knew no more.

When he blinked back into consciousness, he was away from Privet Drive, no longer in Little Whinging, or in that hateful dining room where Harry Potter could do nothing right because he was a good-for-nothing little freak. When he woke again, it was later in the evening, and the room he was in was circular, large, with the stone walls covered in brightly patterned tapestry. There were plush couches upholstered in bright reds and gold fabric, and chintz chairs scattered around the massive room. A large, old-fashioned, ornate fireplace with a roaring fire stood on one side, warming the space up, and there were children and teenagers milling about, some sprawled on the couches, some on the carpeted floors. Many of them were writing into fanciful looking paper, using feather quills, and referencing thick books with moving picture illustrations. Some were playing with strange exploding cards or stones. Everyone looked relaxed and happy and the feeling of utter homeliness enveloped Harry as he took in the Gryffindor Tower common room with no small amount of relief.

He cast about for a moment, his jaw still aching, before he found them: a red-headed, impossibly freckly boy, his head bent over a chessboard where the pieces moved on their own and occasionally talked, and a brown-haired girl with massive, curly, frizzy hair and large buck teeth waved him over excitedly.

“Oh Harry!” the girl cried happily as he ambled over to join them and she spoke a mile a minute, gesticulating excitedly at the book in her lap and the card with a moving photo of two very old, very funny looking men wearing brightly colored frocks. “Ron and I thought you wouldn’t make it out of detention with Professor McGonagall fast enough for you to help us with looking for Nicolas Flamel! Look, Ron found a chocolate card with him and Dumbledore in it! I think tomorrow we can go looking for him in the books in the library!”

“What do you say, mate?” said the red-haired boy, grinning happily as Harry took a seat opposite him as he reset his chessboard. “Hermione thinks we should just ask Madam Pince, but I reckon, if we use your cloak, we could sneak into the Restricted Section and find the books there.”

Harry stared at his two best friends, his two _only_ friends in the world, his eyes stinging and his throat hurting all of a sudden, even more than the throbbing bruise on his jaw. He wished for all the world that this was true and real and not some figment of his imagination, because there was nothing that he wanted more than anything in the world but for him to be here, in the Gryffindor Tower common room, in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, with his friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, and looking up books with funny moving pictures for information on some bloke named Nicolas Flamel, who apparent invented something called the Philosopher’s Stone, which the three of them had guessed was being kept hidden behind that locked room in the third floor corridor, because Hogwarts, where Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia and Dudley couldn’t reach him, was the safest place on earth.

But he also knew that once he fell asleep here in front of the fire in the common room, or in the fancy, comfortable four-poster bed in the Gryffindor dorms, that he would wake again in his cupboard, with his face hurting, his jaw and neck bruised, and his stomach growling from the lack of dinner, because this place, this magical wondrous place with the magical wondrous people, people who liked him, people who were his friends… they were all in his head. Magic wasn’t real, and good things didn’t happen to lonely little boys named Harry Potter.

* * *

Elsewhere, somewhere off the coast of Scotland, on a tiny island set in the stormy waters of the North Sea, the island fortress of Azkaban housed a man trapped in the throes of his own delusions.

In the back of his mind, Sirius Black knew that he sat in his squalid 5 by 9 feet cell of rough black stone hewed by hatred, madness and dark magic on three sides, and unyielding black steel bars that no magic, however powerful, could bend or break, for Azkaban was no ordinary fortress in the middle of nowhere. The dark fortress was the maximum security prison of the magical world, where the most violent criminals of the magical community in Britain were sentenced once the might of the Ministry of Magic caught up to them, and Sirius Black was Azkaban’s most high profile prisoner, as well as one of its longest serving inmates currently detained. He predated even his cousin, Bellatrix Lestrange nee Black in this prison by two days.

The night air, this high up and this far out, was frigid, and the inmates were allowed little more than a threadbare blanket to weather the insane vagaries of the cold northern hemisphere climate. The tang of sea air mixed with the fetid stench of human bodies shoved into tiny boxes, allowed very little in the way of human dignity, for each cell in the maximum security cell block here contained only a flat, flea-infested cot, and said threadbare blankets. There were no facilities for relieving bodily functions, so the inmates often had to stew in their own filth until the magic that ran like clockwork twice a day Vanished their piss and shit along with the remnants of the stale bread and fruit that was the twice daily fare of every prisoner.

Inmates were never allowed out of their cells, so besides being filthy, malnourished and underfed, the ones who had weaker magic to sustain their bodies in the oppressive dark cold quickly fell ill from scurvy, rickets and osteomalacia from the lack of sun exposure. The old and infirm succumbed to illness that should not have afflicted magical people, for their magic should have sustained them against mundane illnesses that afflicted muggles. But in a prison where inmates were thrown in and most never see the other side of the bars of their cells evermore, it was easy to succumb to depression and malaise, that then ate at a wizard’s magical strength, until the magic could no longer sustain the body.

Too many who had been thrown into Azkaban in the days following the Dark Lord Voldemort’s fall in 1981 have already passed. The tiny graveyard in the island, just south of the tower entrance had more than doubled its unmarked tombstones in the years hence. Azkaban was a prison where once you were thrown in, no one would remember you, no one would care. You were in it, and you would never get out of it, not unless you were a carcass wasted away in the loneliness, the terrifying silence, that permeated its cold, unfeeling walls.

That didn’t even taken into account the true nightmare that lent Azkaban fortress its true horror, for the prison was guarded by the most foul of magical creatures in existence: dementors, creatures of night and darkness that preyed on happiness, warmth and light, all things a magical person needed to sustain magic in the face of adversity. Many an inmate have descended into lunacy, all of their happy memories ripped to shreds and sucked out of their souls by those foul creatures, well before their bodies succumbed to mundane illness.

This night, the dementors had already finished their rounds. The air was cold, but that was just from the mundane fact that Azkaban was in the middle of the North Sea. During the day, the fortress was awash with noise: the sound of the waves crashing on the rocky beach and against the stone of the massive hulking turrets, the screams of the damned, begging for freedom, for forgiveness, for food, for a release from their mortal sheaths. In the corridor where Sirius’s cell was, there were the screams of the other Death Eaters, followers of Voldemort, who shouted and proclaimed their demented devotion to a dead lord who had done nothing but pillage their world of goodness in his quest for blood purity and power.

At night though, the corridor was silent. There were no half-mad barks of insane laughter as one Death Eater or other recalled some depraved attack or event or ritual in which they’d partaken in the heyday of their dark lord. The infirm kept their mouths shut for fear of inviting attention from the dementors with their wailing of their ills and aches. The silence was heavy, oppressive and punctuated only by the perpetual crash of waves, the sound of a lonely seagull crying out into the night.

It was in this silence that Sirius Black dreamed, though his eyes were open and his mind was aware that he was dreaming.

In his dreams, the sun was high, in the middle of summer, across the vast golden moors of the West Country. To the east, the lands were open and wild, punctuated by the odd tenacious shrubbery (and that was usually how you told the magical from the mundane plants, for the mundane plants and weed inevitably died on the infertile, acidic soil, but the magical plants spread and grew in blazing shades of gold, violets and reds). To the south, an ancient, but lovingly maintained Tudor-style manor house rose majestically over the heath, its surrounding gardens and grounds bounded by inexplicably lush topiary. Against the backdrop of a sky so clear and blue it rivaled the waters of Atlantis, the figure of a boy with wild black hair. He zipped and turned and twirled, riding the broomstick his parents had gifted him for his sixteenth birthday, a top of the line racing broomstick from Nimbus Racing Broom Company, as he waved at a group of teenagers sprawled on the lush grounds of the manor. One was a tall, gangly boy with light brown hair streaked with grey. His green eyes sparkled with laughter as a girl with red hair the color of the red sky at night, a sailor’s delight, as she gesticulated wildly, telling a story about the time the boy on the broom mucked up a date they had planned some weeks past. Another boy, pudgy and ruddy, with blond hair and watery blue eyes laughed skittishly at the story as he reached for a crumpet in the heaping pile on a dessert tray they had between the five of them. Beside them was Sirius, his head upturned to gaze up at the boy in the sky, his grey eyes clear, his lush, long hair waving and curling like a dark halo above his head as he lay in the grass and waved up at the boy in the sky.

He remembered this scene, from years past, back when he and James and Remus and Lily had just finished their last year in Hogwarts. This was the time before they’d all joined the Order of the Phoenix, an idyllic time for them, before the war and Voldemort and betrayal had swept them all up, ending the lives of some, destroying the lives of others. Lily told them the story of how James had come to visit with her family, and inadvertently pissed off her older sister, Petunia, and her sister’s fiancé, Vernon, who had been bragging about his car and his money. James, who belonged to a family not quite in the league of the magical royalty that Sirius hailed but rich enough that god and the devil would have been jealous, had talked about his collection of racing brooms, the cost of which collectively rivaled the GDP of a small country.

Remus and Peter had found the story hilarious. Sirius had, of course, heard it before, the moment James had returned from the Evanses, and he was more preoccupied with basking in the warmth and happiness of being surrounded by his friends, and with the joy and pride of watching his best mate enjoy the thing that James loved the most: flying.

He closed his eyes, letting the sounds of his friends laughter wash over him, like the tinkle of glass in a toast, the clink of silver and diamonds… and the ripping sound of his mother screaming obscenities. _Blood traitor. Filth. Abomination of my flesh._ The screech of Walburga Black’s voice as she yelled “ _Crucio_!” Her wand held aloft over fifteen-year-old Sirius’s terrified face. A flash of sinister red light, and then, unending, unimaginable pain. A burst of blue light, the Expulso curse, throwing him against the tapestry-covered walls of his father’s study in Grimmauld Place. The sound of bone breaking, the labored gasp of breath that expelled from his mouth, twisted in a pained grimace. _Calvorio_. The scalping curse cast over and over until his scalp was raw and bleeding, his long hair shorn in a blood-matted mess at his feet.

The cackle of Bellatrix’s laughter, and the ominous smell of ozone, remnant of a Killing Curse. A destroyed house rising out of the streets of Godric’s Hollow. James’s handsome, young face blank, devoid of animation or emotion, his eyes empty. Dead. Upstairs, Lily in a heap of red hair, splayed limbs, and her white cotton night gown. The gurgling cries of a toddler wailing for his mum and dad as a trickle of blood dripped down from an open gash on his forehead, a strange scar the shape of a lightning bolt.

Sirius let out a sob and opened his eyes to the frigid, frost-covered walls of his grimy cell. Outside, in the corridor, three dementors loomed, feasting on the happy memory of his last carefree summer with his friends, sucking it out of his addled, confused mind, leaving only the devastation and death he’d seen in his life. He was never going to be happy again, never going to see his friends, his best mate, the woman he loved as a sister, the child who was his godson and one he’d come to consider as his own.

No, he didn’t do it. He was innocent. He would never betray James. _Please, you have to understand, Remus, I love him! I love them both!_

On the far wall of Sirius’s cell, high above was a tiny window that opened out into the vast wild nothingness of the night sky. The sky was dark tonight, the earth facing the dark side of the moon. The stars lent but a feebly cold light, barely enough to illuminate the froth of sea foam on jagged rock. High above, blotting out the unmoving, unfeeling stars, a murder of ravens cawed into the blackness. Spring was coming, and it was time to migrate back into their haunts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may be some of the darkest prose I've ever written. I took personal experience references of doing chores at a very young age (my siblings and I were very independent--had to be with both parents working, and living in a foreign country where there were no adults to watch us). Some of the misadventures and accidents Harry experienced here were things that have invariably happened to my older brother and I. Even the part where he couldn't reach the pot on the stove, and doing the ironing, though granted I was eight when I learned to do some of these chores, and I wasn't allowed to do any cooking until I was ten. Also, I didn't have guardians who were abusive, that's all Harry there.
> 
> I thought with the lyrics from the musical's Prologue, it worked really well to juxtapose Harry and Sirius's miserable childhoods, and I'm inordinately proud of how dark and dreary and miserable I've done the part about Sirius.
> 
> Oh, also if you're interested in the musical version I reference, the one I'm using (and listening to when I write) is the 1988 symphonic recording. I grew up listening to this. My dad was very into Les Mis, and the Lloyd-Webber musicals, so this recording has a very special place in my heart and my childhood.


	3. Days Long Past

Then I was young and unafraid  
And dreams were made and used and wasted  
There was no ransom to be paid  
No song unsung, no wine untasted

From _Les Miserables_

* * *

Daytime in Azkaban differed very little from Azkaban at night. There was perhaps a little more light than the pitch blackness that usually enveloped everything in Azkaban. Dementors required no light, though the human Aurors that walked rounds in Azkaban fortress in the morning was dreary, grey and damp, which was not vastly different, in Sirius’s opinion, from living in London, except for that minuscule detail of the fact that as much as his mother was an utter harpy, she had nothing on the presence of dementors. Walburga Black was foul-mouthed with the blood purity slurs she liked to hurl on her wayward, rebellious son, and she was quick with the wand when her two boys were anything less than utterly compliant to her whims, but Sirius at least had some sort of respite from her presence when he managed to barricade himself in his bedroom.

There was no such respite from the dementors. It was as if their very essence lived in the dirty, implacable stone walls of the fortress, and in the early days of spring this far up north, it meant unending cold, whether the sun shone or not.

Sirius was therefore surprised when he stirred awake as Padfoot that morning. Evidently, the torture of constantly being surrounded by dementors the night before had been too much for him and he’d sought refuge in his animagus form somewhere in the middle of the night in order to obtain some rest, and as soon as awareness returned, he transformed back, to find that the torches in the corridors were lit and the yellow dancing flames lent a modicum of warm light seeping and dancing among the shadows of the cells. He could hear the murmur of the other prisoners, Death Eaters the lot of them were, clearly surprised at the change, before a burst of white light and even more warmth than Sirius had ever encountered in the nine years he’d spent wrongfully imprisoned in this godforsaken island coalesced into a stallion Patronus. Voice coming in the direction of the winding staircase that led down to the administrative office and the Azkaban pier pierced the hubbub of the prisoners gibbering about the change in the dreariness of their existence. Someone important had come, someone who wasn’t the usual grizzled, Azkaban-hardened Aurors who made their rounds once every few weeks.

“Looks like someone has come to play,” Bellatrix giggled, her high-pitched voice the one female vocal on the floor of overwhelmingly male prison populace.

Sirius didn’t bother to haul himself up from the threadbare cot in which he’d folded his long body. Whoever it was, they were next to useless. No one had bothered to hear his protestations of innocence when he’d first been hauled up here, and whoever this newcomer was, it was just as likely they wouldn’t be interested in what he had to say.

He did cock his head up from the nest of rags that passed as blankets though when he heard the pompous, self-important tones of Cornelius Fudge. Sirius hadn’t known it at the time that he’d first arrived at Azkaban, but Fudge had been one of the first at the scene when Peter had blasted that muggle square and transformed and escaped, leaving Sirius as the patsy for his crimes against James and Lily. Everett Plimp, Azkaban’s Warden at the time he’d been booked, relished in recounting how Sirius’s capture had bagged Fudge an Order of Merlin for his testimony of Peter’s utter betrayal of the Marauders, and ultimately ushered the man as a shoe-in for Minister Bagnold’s replacement when she retired her post. Sirius despised the man beyond the telling, having remembered Fudge in his early days of working at the Ministry, whenever Sirius visited James in the Aurors’ Office before the Potters had gone into hiding. Fudge had been the sort of brown-nosing bureaucrat, better suited to pushing papers than in the Minister’s Office, and Plimp, yet another bastard whose neck Sirius would love to wring the life out of should he ever get out of Azkaban, enjoyed recounting the tale of Fudge’s rise to power whenever he went on his rounds, until one time Bellatrix had evidently laid in wait for him and bit his ear off in the middle of his headcount check. Sirius thought he’d never be grateful to his crazy, hateful cousin for anything, but her attack on Plimp ended with the Auror obtaining a reassignment, and Sirius finally obtained a respite on that angle of his tortured existence.

The Minister was surrounded by a gaggle of Aurors and a small army of Patronuses as he came up to the Death Eater corridor. At the sight of the Minister for Magic, the prisoners had all risen up to the bars of their cells, yelling obscenities and epithets at the man who held the reigns to the tormentors of their existence.

Sirius sat in his cot and eyed Fudge distastefully. After nine years, his hatred of Fudge had fizzled into an indifferent sort of dislike as he reserved his energy for nurturing the poison of the Black hatred that still resided in his blood for the traitor that landed him in his current predicament in the first place.

The years had not been especially kind to the Minister. Sirius remembered Fudge as a middle-aged paunchy man with a ruddy complexion, thinning hair, and a penchant for ostentatious dress. In a way, he reminded Sirius rather strongly of Horace Slughorn, the Hogwarts Potions Master in Sirius’s time, with both being enamored with celebrity: Slughorn with the celebrity of others, Fudge, with his own. He didn’t look like he’d had an easy go of it in the years since Sirius had last seen him in that destroyed muggle square, with the deeply etched worry lines deepening still as he talked to the Aurors that led him around the horror that was Azkaban’s maximum security cell block in the early morning.

“It does smell rather terrible somewhat, don’t you think?” Fudge asked the tall swarthy Auror that Sirius recognized as Kingsley Shacklebolt. Shacklebolt had been a seventh year when Sirius had been in his first, and he had been James’s squad leader before James had to resign his Auror badge in the early days before everything went to utter shit. He didn’t remember the man being any more remarkable than the next wizard, not when James was there, quite literally outshining everyone by the mere mundane fact of his existence. An existence now long dead and gone, the loss of which still ached excruciatingly in the very creak of Sirius’s bones. His fault that James was dead, that Lily was dead…

Shacklebolt nodded, though his expression betrayed no indication that he agreed with the Minister at all. “The Vanishing spells do not start until after the inmates are served their morning ration.”

“A wise precaution lest—“ Another Auror started to say but whatever she had been about to say had been cut short abruptly as something foul smelling hurtled out of Antonin Dolohov’s cell. The Auror was quick to respond with a Shield spell that disintegrated whatever it was Dolohov had hurled at the entourage.

“Dear me,” Fudge said, tugging his bowler hat firmly over his head, and clutching at the newspaper in his hand. Sirius hadn’t noticed that, preoccupied as he was in watching the Patronuses that kept the dementors at bay, and against his better judgment, the bubbling excitement at seeing something other than drab gray rags or the black that shrouded the dementors. Perhaps Fudge had some use after all.

“Here he is, Minister,” said an Auror with hair the color of dirt. Sirius vaguely recalled who he was but couldn’t quite place a name to the face. He’d forgotten so many things between the wearisome plod of the years that passed and the dementors sucking every bit of marginally joyful memory he could muster.

The group of them stopped at the front of Sirius’s cell. The wall of Aurors and Patronuses parted to allow Fudge a glimpse of the infamous so-called right-hand man of You Know Who, Sirius Black. Sirius stared indifferently, not quite fully cognizant of how he looked—there were just some things one had to let go of living in one’s own filth for the better part of a decade—just as Fudge stared back at him, dismay coloring his ruddy features that made his sagging jowls shake.

Fudge seemed to let out a small sigh of relief that he’d laid eyes on Sirius at last, and Sirius let his lips curl into a lop-sided smile half-hidden by his bedraggled, overly long and scruffy beard. “At least, we can discount Black’s single-mindedness in pursuing the boy. Dumbledore truly has much to answer for, with the Boy Who Lived not surfacing back in our world when he was meant to.”

“Quite, sir,” Shacklebolt responded blandly.

Fudge made to turn away, but Sirius darted out of his cot to clutch skeletal fingers caked with dirt at the bars that kept him in.

“Minister,” he rasped, his voice sounding like parchment dragging over sand with how ill-used it was; Sirius was one of the only silent inmates in the Death Eater corridor, where everyone moaned and whinged and screamed either their undying devotion to their long-dead dark lord, or, some years ago before Barty Crouch died, moaned and whinged and whimpered for his mummy to take the pain of silence and cold and loneliness away.

Fudge half-turned, a look of baffled petrification settling over his face at his surprise at being addressed. Sirius pressed his face against the cold steel bars.

“Do you still need that?” He gestured at the paper, aiming for an air of nonchalance that he felt no longer came as naturally as it used to when his father still taught him the right way to carry himself when he was a child. He knew he must look quite deranged and nothing else these days. “Would you care to donate it to a bored convict? I quite miss doing the crossword these days.”

Fudge stared in utter bewilderment for a moment at the paper in his hand before he shoved it in Sirius’s face, not waiting for him to grasp it. The paper fell on the ground and Sirius scrabbled with his emaciated hands for a while before he managed to get it close enough to grab it into his cell. He backed slowly into his cot, and Fudge frowned as he watched him.

“Come along now, Minister,” said the Auror whose name kept eluding Sirius’s memory. “We’ve confirmed that Black remains here in Azkaban, as he well should. Now, it’s time to address Albus Dumbledore.”

Fudge looked mutinous for a moment, like a whinging “do we have to?” was just at the tip of his tongue, before he nodded briskly and allowed the Aurors to escort him back towards the staircase, away from the madness and despair that plagued to prisoners of Azkaban. Sirius paid no attention to the departing party, and hunkered down in his cell with the paper.

The headline was a boring discussion of some new Ministry law or other, probably at the insistence of another stuffy bureaucrat grandstanding on some pathetically insignificant platform like limiting the number of wands sold to magical people. It wasn’t like it was easy to obtain a new wand when one’s own still worked and in a person’s possession: wands tended to be territorial once it has chosen its wizard, making it difficult for him to obtain the allegiance of another wand unless it was through rite of conquest. Sirius ignored that and flipped through the pages for more interesting bits of news, of which the paper, the evening edition of The Daily Prophet, appeared to have in sparse quantities. It seemed after his capture, the world at large had settled into a more peaceful time, if discussion on breeding crups with Yorkshire terriers were now the height of evening news, and he would have flipped directly to the Quidditch section to check the stats for his team, a habit that long years of having never practiced on account of being in prison had evidently not been broken yet, when he saw it.

The article was a short piece by a skeevy sounding intrepid reporter who wouldn’t let a bit of old news die down, even though said article was on page 6. Sirius sat bolt upright as he saw the title:

**Harry Potter Missing: How the Ministry Misplaced the Boy Who Lived**

> It has been six months since the start of the Hogwarts fall term and still the Ministry of Magic has neither found nor procured the Boy Who Lived. Eleven-year-old Harry Potter should have been among the curious delighted faces of incoming First Years, to be found on Platform 9 and 3/4 on September 1, 1991. The son of departed Auror, James F Potter, and his Muggleborn wife, Lily, two of the last casualties of You Know Who’s reign of terror before the joyous All Hallows when the larger wizarding world received news of the dark wizard’s death at the hands of the baby Potter, Harry should be returning back to Hogwarts for his second term of the year following Easter. Instead, the Boy Who Lived remains missing, and wizarding Britain must ask: What has happened to the Boy Who Lived?
> 
> This reporter did some digging and found that Magical Britain’s most famous orphan was never event registered in the Office of Magical Children as needing a family to take him in after You Know Who tragically murdered his parents on All Hallows Eve of 1981, a series of events triggered by the stunning betrayal of the boy’s parents by the infamous mass murderer and right hand man of You Know Who, Sirius Black (see page 11 for related article on Black’s incarceration in Azkaban)
> 
> All magical children who have been orphaned or have lost their magical guardians are mandated by Wizengamot law to be presented to the welfare office covering Magical Children. In the chaos and confusion of the end of the war, precious little has been done for the Boy Who Lived.
> 
> When reached by this reporter for comment, the Minister for Magic, Cornelius Fudge, had this to say: “My predecessor of the time trusted the guidance of Albus Dumbledore, a known friend of the Potters. In the absence of a last Will and Testament from James and Lily Potter, it was deemed appropriate for the Ministry to trust in the decision-making of our Chief Warlock, one that I am now coming to regret as Dumbledore has consistently failed to procure Harry Potter to start his first year in Hogwarts. Dumbledore has previously assured the Ministry that Mr Potter is safe with family, but that no longer seems to be the case.”
> 
> The Hogwarts faculty could not be reached for comment at the time of printing as school is back in session, though Deputy Headmistress Minerva Mcgonagall has confirmed back in September that the owl letter for Mr Potter’s admittance could not be conveyed as the magic of the Hogwarts Book of Admittance could not find any child by the name.
> 
> What does this mean for the wizarding world at large? Does this mean that the celebrated young hero responsible for the freedom and peace we all enjoy now has been killed? How else could a child’s name no longer appear in the Book of Admittance? Should we simply accept that the Boy Who Lived is nothing more than a memory, like his parents? And should the Wizengamot, and the larger Wizarding World, not take Albus Dumbledore, the man responsible for the safety of our most celebrated magical child, to task for misplacing the Boy Who Lived?
> 
> _With reports and correspondence from Rita Skeeter_

Sirius stared hard at the inset photo of a dark-haired toddler with a lightning bolt scar on his forehead. His hands, bony and emaciated though they were curled tightly into fists, crushing the edges of the parchment of the newspaper, as a flush of hatred and sick fear bloomed in the pit of his gut. Harry was missing. His godson, Prongs’ and Lily’s baby, was missing, possibly dead. Sirius didn’t think he could abide living without assuring himself that his godson was safe. If he was truly gone, then there was no further reason for Sirius to live.

He stared down at the article again, his eyes misting and brimming with tears for the first time in nine years, since he’d seen James’s cold dead body in the floor of his cottage in Godric’s Hollow. Family, the Fudge had been quoted in the article. James no longer had any immediate family after his parents’ deaths from dragonpox back in ’79. Sirius’s own family would have been the closest surviving relations, with James’s mother, Dorea, being Sirius’s great aunt once removed.

Dumbledore would never place Harry with the Blacks, though, given how easily he’d believed that Sirius turned from the Order and embraced his family’s allegiance to Voldemort. No, it had to be Lily’s family. Sirius remembered that Lily’s parents had died of some accident or other in the height of the war, and the Order had suspected then that they’d been targeted by Death Eaters. But she had a sister, Sirius recalled, the muggle one, with the long neck and judgmental frown. Sirius remembered fuzzily how James had whinged at him over how Lily’s sister had been an utter clod about their wedding, refusing to partake in the “freakishness” of it all.

He wracked his brain for any scrap of information he could remember of where Lily’s family lived. Some factory town up north, he remembered…

He glanced out towards the corridor. It was empty once more, the dementors were not due to return until later, when the sun set, and with the Aurors preoccupied with the minister’s visit, the corridor would remain empty for hours on end.

Sirius watched with a vague fascination as his portion of the morning ration appeared at the end of his cot. Stale sourdough bread, dry eggs, an apple that was about to go bad. A mug of water. He turned back at the bars of his cell.

No food then, just the water should be enough. He had a mission to see to. He would find Harry if it was the last thing he did. And if he failed, well, who was going to mourn when the infamous mass murderer and traitor, Sirius Black, finally kicked the proverbial bucket?

* * *

Harry had to miss school Thursday and Friday because the bruise on his face looked livid, was too conspicuously shaped like a fist and not one the size of a kid’s fist. Aunt Petunia kept him in the cupboard on Thursday and told him he would only be let out twice—once in the morning for a bit of dry toast, milk, and a bathroom kip, and once in the evening to prepare another sumptuous dinner for the Dursleys while he had tinned tomato soup in the kitchen.

On Friday, Aunt Petunia phoned the school and told Mr Ambrose that Harry was ill, and after a bit more of dry toast, was promptly set to work scrubbing the toilets with a toothbrush. He finished in the late afternoon and was sent on an errand to buy frozen carrots and peas for the soup dinner, whereupon the lady at the checkout counter asked him if he was feeling well, and Harry had to suffer the humiliation of telling her that he’d hit his face falling off the kitchen counter while horsing around. He’d had to learn how to lie convincingly to random adultsabout his bruises from the time he was seven, or he would just be setting himself up to get more the minute he set foot home.

On the walk back, he entertained the notion of running away from the Dursleys, a fanciful idea of being shot of Dudley’s malicious bullying, Aunt Petunia’s frigid orders to clean the house, and Uncle Vernon’s swinging fists. He’d thought of running away a couple times, as far back as when he first started in primary school and learned that adults were not interested in heeding his entreaties for help if it meant that they had to go out of their way to do so.

There had been a time when he was seven and he’d told his English teacher at the time, a Mr Sutton, who’d been nice to him and patiently taught him how to improve his terrible, barely legible handwriting, that he had trouble following the handwriting exercises because he couldn’t see the squiggly dotted lines well enough to follow them. Mr Sutton had written to Aunt Petunia that he thought Harry’s eyes needed to be checked by a specialist, and Aunt Petunia had gone to the school administrators and Mr Sutton had to attend some important meeting with them and Aunt Petunia, and after that, no more was said about Harry’s terrible handwriting, or his dubious eyesight.

That had been the order of the day with every teacher, guidance counselor, or even neighbor who had expressed concern for Harry’s wellbeing. When he was eight and Uncle Vernon had given him a right hiding for the lawnmower breaking down while Harry had been using it one weekend, he’d asked the school nurse for some ice to soothe the bruising. The nurse had called Aunt Petunia, and she’d told the school that Harry was a naughty boy who didn’t listen when he was told not to climb trees and that was the reason his backside hurt for days. Mrs Burton from Number 7 had once asked if Harry would like to play with her two children, since Dudley and his friends refused to play with him in their afternoon games outside. Dudley and his friends then proceeded to bully Amy and Gregory Burton ruthlessly, until Amy went home crying and telling her mother that she didn’t want to play with Harry anymore.

With a reputation built on lies told by his guardians, Harry came to be known as the neighborhood bad egg. Neighbors crossed the street when Harry was in Number 4’s yard doing the weeding or watering Aunt Petunia’s rose bushes. In school, he was known as a compulsive liar, a loner and a freak. No one believed him when he was hurt, so Harry learned to hide his hurts with the same set of lies that rolled off smoothly whenever Aunt Petunia was called to his school.

So on Saturday, in the mid-morning, while out in the yard doing the weeding, he was utterly gobsmacked at the sight of Dr White, standing at the curb, an ugly-looking black, boxy car behind him (one he’d obviously driven to Privet Drive though Harry could not remember seeing any car pass by much less slowing at the front of the Dursley’s house), just on the fringes of Aunt Petunia’s yard. He didn’t recognize or even notice Harry instantly as Aunt Petunia had taken to making him wear a bonnet because his hair insisted on being long and unruly and covering up his face, and a bandana to cover his bruise, which had lightened significantly by now from a mottled reddish purple to a sickly green ringed with ochre, so that none of the neighbors would pay any attention to his face. When he was asked why he was so bundled up on a perfectly fine spring day, Harry was to reply that he got cold easily. The bandana was stifling and on occasion, the fuzzy bits of fabric would tickle his nose and make him sneeze, and that was what he’d done exactly as Dr White’s shiny black loafers pressed into the damp grass as he crossed the yard to ring the bell.

Harry stood from where he was bent over the rose bushes below the front window and stared at Dr White for a moment, and realized he had never seen the man in anything outside of the stiff grey suit and white coat that he always wore when Harry saw him in school. Dr White dressed conspicuously in strange, old-fashioned looking clothes: grey linen trousers in a cut Harry hadn’t seen worn by any of the young adults he’d noticed in his walks home from school or to the nearby Tesco. Most people of Dr White’s age usually dressed in blue jeans and t-shirts on mild weather weekends, but Dr White was in a pressed, starchy white button-down, a blue silk ascot at his neck. His loafers, which were of shiny black leather, with an old-fashioned silver buckle on top, looked like they had not been fashionable in years, and his top hat was definitely something Harry hadn’t seen worn amongst young adults, and Harry should know since Mr Dartworth of Number 9 had a soon who had just returned from uni last summer, and Timothy Dartworth lived in joggers, hoodies and espadrilles in the summer, and sneakers all through the rest of the year. He carried an old-fashioned leather briefcase, the buckles and locks of which shone a burnished gold. He was so odd, with his obviously expensive tailored clothes, elegant manner, and the black wooden cane he used to support the barely noticeable limp in his gait, and comely features that Harry was surprised he hadn’t seen the man coming from the moment he turned the corner from Wisteria Walk into Privet Drive.

Aunt Petunia open the door after a moment and Harry watched as she took in the sight of Dr White’s winsome, comely smile as Dr White doffed his top hat. Even with her makeup, Harry could tell Aunt Petunia was blushing.

“Good morning, Mrs Dursley,” Dr White said, his posh accent making the flush in Aunt Petunia’s face spread down her neck, where it was even more noticeable since she didn’t powder beyond her jawline. “My name is Archie White, I’m the guidance counselor at St Brutus’s Academy for Boys. I had an appointment at 9 o’clock with your nephew, Harry Potter, and when he did not show in my office, I thought I would pay a visit to check if he’s all right? I hear from his teachers that Harry was not in school for the past two days. I’ve brought his school work with me, if you would kindly permit me to meet with him this morning.”

Aunt Petunia spotted Harry standing in the middle of the garden, his bandana askew, his hands dirty with remnants of weeds, soil and the odd cut from the rose thorns and promptly paled. “Hello Dr White. You’ll have to excuse our dear Harry, he’s a sickly boy. The changing weather and all the pollen in the air, you know.” She let out a nervous, high-pitched giggle even as she made several abortive, sharp gestures at Harry to get in, through the back door in the kitchen so he didn’t track dirt on her immaculate living room floor.

Harry suppressed the urge to roll his eyes, pull down his bandana and alert the doctor to his presence in the yard. No good would come of such an action anyway. Dr White may be here now and his presence and inevitable shock at Harry appearing hale and hearty save for the massive bruise on his face would embarrass Aunt Petunia, but Dr White would go away later, and then Harry would definitely be in for it if he called attention to the fact that he hadn’t been ill at all. Quietly, he let himself back into the house through the back door, pausing before he entered to remove his bonnet and hose down his dirty hands in the backyard. The bandana would have to stay until he was sure Aunt Petunia wasn’t going to whack him with a broom for showing his ugly bruised mug to Dr White.

He heard Aunt Petunia let the man in and offer him tea, which Dr White graciously accepted. Once Harry was sure he no longer looked like he’d been mucking stables instead of staying home in a sick bed, he let himself back in the house and strolled out to the sitting room, where Aunt Petunia was simpering at Dr White, who stood off the couch, where Dudley was sprawled playing Street Fighter on his Nintendo with Piers Polkiss. Dr White was staring with obvious distaste as Dudley and Piers shouted out their moves at each other, and occasionally stuffed their mouths with buttered crumpets. The game controllers were greasy from their sticky fingers, and Dr White seemed to find it all unbelievably crass and terrible.

“Good morning, sir,” Harry greeted quietly. Dr White’s eyes flew from where he’d been staring in vague horror at Dudley and Piers towards Harry’s face, almost immediately zeroing in on the still healing bruise on the side of his face, despite his hair partially obscuring the worst of it.

Dr White stared wordlessly for a long moment before he finally found his voice. “Hello Harry,” he said, his voice unusually high pitched and sounding rather wobbly. Behind him, Aunt Petunia glared daggers at Harry, her hands gesticulating sharply for him to move his hair about to cover the bruise, though it was evidently too late, as Dr White had obviously seen it already.

Harry scratched the back of his head. “Er, sorry I missed our meeting.”

Aunt Petunia’s nose flared and if she wasn’t so pale, she would probably have turned the same puce Uncle Vernon did whenever he got mad at Harry and the tendons in her neck looked about ready to snap, before she reined herself in and plastered a fake smile on her thin lips.

“Yes, as I said, Harry has been unwell for days, why it’s only now that he’s even up and about the house.” An outright lie, belied utterly by the fact that Harry evidently came from the backdoor in the kitchen. If he’d been sick, he probably shouldn’t have been out back.

Dr White pasted his own polite fake smile as he turned to Aunt Petunia. “Mrs Dursley, perhaps Harry and I could sit in a quieter room to discuss his missed lessons and our… counseling session.”

Aunt Petunia looked like she wanted to be affronted at the suggestion that Dudley’s presence was anything less than welcome in a discussion about Harry, but she obligingly led Dr White to the dining room, snagging Harry sharply by his skinny arm, silent warning to keep his mouth shut about the real reason why he’d missed school.

Sat across from each other, with Dr White’s piercing eyes at the scene where Harry had last been hit, Harry hunched his shoulders when Dr White stared at him some more, without saying anything.

“Er, sir, you mentioned about my school work?” Harry offered diffidently when White remained silent, something that terrified Harry because silence was something he was ill-equipped to manage, having dealt all his life with the Dursleys yelling and screaming at him whenever they were displeased for the slightest reason. No one had ever dealt with him quietly when they were upset.

White let out a slow breath as he pulled up his old-fashioned briefcase and setting it on top of the dining table. “Yes, of course, though we can perhaps discuss that later, since I doubt you’ll have trouble with a bit of writing exercise and maths.” He opened his briefcase and withdraw a small stack of photographs. “I wanted to… talk to you about something else.”

Harry cocked his head curiously, his eyes darting to the photos in White’s pale hand. There was something odd about them. “Are those photos of my parents, sir?”

White looked utterly surprised, which Harry thought was rather rich given that White was the one who offered to talk to Harry about his parents earlier in the week. That had been the entire reason why Harry had gotten hit in the first place, since he wouldn’t tell Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia what the counseling meeting was supposed to be about.

“I—not exactly,” said Dr White, “though perhaps there’s some tangent there for you to infer.” He cleared his throat, selected a single photo on the stack and dropped the rest back into his briefcase. Harry watched him closely and White muttered something unintelligible beneath his breath, before handing Harry the photo.

It was a picture of a group of students, in their late teens, probably. Harry could tell instantly there was something utterly different in the photo. It was a group photograph of about seven students and a saggy-jowled white haired older man that was evidently their teacher.None of the teenagers in the photo stood out except for a young woman with striking red hair, and a handsome boy with long black hair and the air of someone evidently not wanting to be in the photo at all. He could see said boy standing next to another boy who looked so much like him that there was no doubt in Harry that they were brothers. Stand out kids notwithstanding though, there was obviously something off in the picture. For one, everyone in it weren’t wearing the polo shirt and trousers or skirts that were common in secondary school-aged children. Other people would have found the long black robes worn by the students, and the different colored ties strange. Harry didn’t. Because he’d seen all of this before.

He stared up at White, who was still looking at him with those unnerving haunted eyes. “Sir,” he said quietly. “Is this Hogwarts?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't really know what I was thinking with this chapter. I had some direction for Regulus's and Harry's meeting and idk lost the plot somewhere in favor of writing Sirius lol so I decided to write the actual meeting for another day, another chapter. I'm absolutely flying by the seat of my pants with this fic, having talked out with my sisters about what I wanted to write and told that I was trying to cram far too many plot twists and changes to make for a coherent story.
> 
> The thing is, I don't count Regulus living through the horcrux hunt in the cave as a plot twist, just some backstory for the story on the forefront that I'm absolutely not giving away yet, though I think it might be a good time to ask if anyone would be interested to beta read the story for me? Or at least discuss plotting with me because I evidently have no clue what I'm doing lol.
> 
> If you're interested, you can hit me up on [Tumblr](https://mumuinc.tumblr.com/) or Discord (mumuinc#7662). This story currently has a very amorphous storyline that changes every two minutes or so lol and I'd like for it to take a bit of shape because ya know what? I wanna write about Regulus living his best life as a muggle (and still being an utter hypocrite about it).
> 
> PS. The car that Regulus drives is a black [Peugeot 309](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peugeot_309). I'm not big on European cars; I like my cars sleek, fast, sporty and Japanese (I originally wanted to give him a Supra, my personal dream car, but figured that's more Sirius's personality. Regulus strikes me as a person who would be a bit more conventional, and therefore old-fashioned). Why he actually drives a car will be explained later when I get into his POV. Suffice it to say that Regulus Black aka Arcturus "Archie" White has been living his life as a muggle. Anyway, the car itself feels like an insight into the personality I'm giving him. Contrast that later with Sirius when the brothers Black finally meet up.
> 
> PPS. Did Antonin Dolohov hurl shit at Cornelius Fudge? Yes. Yes, he did.


	4. The Lies of Dr R A White

The old fool trusted me, he'd done his bit of good  
I played the grateful serf and thanked him like I should  
But when the house was still, I got up in the night  
Took the silver, took my flight!

From _Prologue, Les Miserables_

* * *

Cokeworth was a town near the borders of the Rutland and Leicestershire. It was a large town with a tiny population, evidence of the English populace’s exodus from industrial centers due to the oppressive air of depression that permeated the hazy, polluted air, the stench of industrial waste dumped into the murky brown waters of the still, ugly river that ran through the edges of the town, like a stream of sewage sludge bordered by little mounds of litter and dumped garbage by the uncaring residents. A small colony of feral cats scavenged forscraps of food among the refuse.

Sirius had only been to Cokeworth once, to accompany James when he’d been to Lily’s house to ask her parents for her hand in marriage. The grand proposal had been days before, with James actually enchanting a horde of snitches he’d caught in Quidditch games of years past to spell his proposal. Lily had laughed, utterly enchanted and charmed, where years ago, she would have been put off by the show. Sirius had been chuffed when they’d asked him if he would be the best man in their wedding, which James had already built up in his head like castles on a cloud. A few days later, they’d gone to Cokeworth to formally ask Lily’s family, and James had been utterly dismayed by the sight of Lily’s hometown, especially when they got to where Lily’s family home was.

Sirius could no longer recall much of what had happened that day, it being one of the first happy memories that the dementors had stolen when he was chucked to Azkaban, but he remembered the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness that enveloped the sad, hazy town, and he wondered now whether Lily’s family had stayed in this miserable dump after her death. He remembered Lily’s depression in the midst of her pregnancy when her parents passed, but Lily had a sister, and surely, if she hadn’t moved on from this sorry little dump, then Sirius would at least find someone here who would be able to point him in the right direction.

It was an effort to force his paws, for he had been traveling for hours as Padfoot since his flight from Azkaban, to slink through the refuse and onto the hot paved road. He was parched but he wasn’t desperate or suicidal enough to drink water from the river. The pads of his paws ached and swelled on the hot concrete as he tried to move through the long shadows cast by the old, boarded up brownstones, and his tongue lolled long and dry, as he tried to sniff the air to get his bearings. The smell of industrial waste and rubbish permeated the air on the street he’d found himself on, but he knew he was in the right direction, as he saw a bent street sign at the corner that told him he was close to Weaver Lane. The street he was on, Spinner’s End, had the faintest tang of a familiar sort of magic that told Sirius some other magical lived in the area, but he didn’t care enough to find out who lest they recognize the massive black dog with the matted fur as an animagus as opposed to just another stray.

The streets were empty as Padfoot wend his way through a tiny foot path separating a block of row houses, and found himself on Weaver Lane. The boarded up houses here looked in even worse repair than on Spinner’s End, where some of the houses at least appeared inhabited. Weaver Lane looked like it had been abandoned by time and civilization, with most of the windows nailed shut with rotting planks of carpentry refuse, and a significant number of the houses plastered with rusting “For Sale” signs nailed to termite-eaten doors.

The Evans’ row house wasn’t easy to find when all the houses on the street looked identical, but as Padfoot, he could still feel the ancient remnants of Lily’s lingering magic in the empty flower box that bordered the front windows of the dilapidated terraced house, and he remembered James’s nervous energy skittering through his friend’s veins and infecting Sirius as well when they stood outside and rang the bell to the Evans home. Padfoot huffed a little and pushed himself some more. If Lily’s sister no longer lived here, and she evidently didn’t if the littered front of the house, and the terrible vandalism on sun-bleached faded red brick was any indication, he'd try to find some indication of where she'd gone.

The front door was locked, unsurprisingly, and the creaky “For Sale” sign was on a stand on the steps instead of nailed to the door. Padfoot sniffed at the cracked cement steps for a moment, and looked around. It was late afternoon, he wasn’t sure what day it was, probably a weekday, if the lack of any sentient presence, human or otherwise, was any indication. People who lived in the area would be at work, probably in the old textile mill at the end of the town, the massive building with the tall chimneys that belched smoke into the flat, hazy skies and sludge into the murky river, and anyway, he’d been out of Azkaban for days now, and he’d seen glimpses of muggle newspapers and found no indication that the Ministry had bothered to cooperate with Muggle authorities in search of their escaped prisoner.

 _If the Ministry had even caught on that I’d escaped at all,_ he thought wryly to himself.

The over-reliance on dementors to keep the inmates of Death Eater row turned out to be a boon with his escape, though Sirius had always felt it a curse as the dementors had tormented him with the worst of his sordid memories, the most damaging of his failures. He’d timed his escape the days after the Minister’s visit, knowing that the visit had taxed the human Auror force track of the prisoners. They wouldn’t bother with a headcount or an ocular for at least another week, so Sirius had a good head start on his escape.

Nine years of horrific malnutrition, subsisting on as little as humanly possible of the disgusting slop the prisoners were provided, had nearly done him in during his arduous swim across the North Sea, but as Padfoot, the massive waves were a bit easier to handle, and his determination far outweighed bodily weakness. Sirius had swum through the icy, frothy spray, and then let the currents carry him towards the closest shore, which turned out to be close to Inverness. From there, he’d subsisted on rats in city areas, and the occasional rabbit when he found himself in wooded and forested parts. He stole into lorries and trucks to hitch a long ride from Edinburgh to Liverpool, and alternated a journey on foot and the occasional hitch to Birmingham, until he found his bearings again to make his way from Birmingham to Cokeworth. In between, he’d had to rely on what little he knew of muggles to avoid being trapped by muggle enforcers who apparently impounded stray animals (they were usually in the more populated cities and boroughs), or shot at by hunters. Never once had he had to transform back from dog to human, too afraid that he would be found out and shipped back to Azkaban, perhaps given the Kiss.

He shuddered.

He’d rather die than be caught and sent back, but there was no helping it now. The door was locked and at this point in his journey, he was too weak and dehydrated to try breaking it down, and anyway, Padfoot was more matted fur and bones now than actual bulk. He wouldn’t do any good hurling his body at the door and it would just draw attention to the break-in. No, now he needed to be a wizard.

He glanced around again, making sure there were no eyes on him, hidden or otherwise, and he transformed. This weary, hungry and miserable, the animagus transformation was more than a little terrible to go through, but he gritted his teeth and went through with it. He wasn’t certain whether he still looked like an escaped confict, given that he’d stolen some unsuspecting muggle lorry-driver’s spare clothes when he’d found a set that didn’t smell overwhelmingly like sweat and motor oil, and it wasn’t like beggars could be choosers. Sirius didn’t even have a wand, so he’d take what he could get.

He was still grimy and disgusting, his hair a massive black tangled mass, his beard overgrown and scruffy, but the clothes he’d stolen—a crumpled white shirt with the neck and armpits yellowing from multiple washes of sweat stains and stiff jean trousers that threatened to fall off his rangy hips, resulting in him having to tug them up to his shrunken waist from time to time lest he risk indecent exposure on top of his other supposed crimes—were clean even if they hung about his emaciated form like a tent, and at least he no longer smelled like a cave troll, which perhaps wouldn’t have mattered as much given how foul the air in Cokeworth smelled.

 _I’d’ve been right at home_.

Wandless magic was unreliable on the best of times for most wizards and witches, but Sirius was not most wizards. He lived in arguably one of the most magical households steeped in dark magic for the first fifteen years of his life. His parents had been obsessed with magical excellence in their children, and Sirius had honed wandless casting for most basic spells taught at Hogwarts by the time he had been sixteen, and in fact had used the same skill in his mad flight from home, when he’d run away to the Potters. He’d forgotten a lot of the details of that monumental event in his life, save perhaps the foul epithets and hurled curses from his relentless mother’s wand, but a skill like wandless casting was something that lived in one’s bones. He was rusty with it, but it wasn’t an impossibility.

It still took three whispered tries of _Alohomora_ before the lock finally gave way and Sirius slipped inside into the dust and stale air of the abandoned house. The windows were boarded up in the Evans home so once the door was locked, he needn’t have worried about being seen from the outside. Some of the furnishings he could remember—the lumpy brown couches and armchair upholstered in aged but still serviceably supple corduroy, the rickety square dining table with the chipped leg propped up with a stack of moldy, ancient magazines and yellowing newspapers, and even the ancient dark wood mantle that had once housed frames of unmoving family photos of the Evanses—were all still there and shrouded with tarp. There was a tacky clock above the mantle, the hands stopped at 11:53, which Sirius found ominous. That had been about the time he’d flown to Godric’s Hollow on All Hallows eve of 1981, but it could have also just been a coincidence and the clock had maybe stopped at 11:53 of some dateless morning as opposed to that fateful, horrible night.

He turned away and headed towards the kitchen, where apart from the dining table, the room was devoid of other furniture and any of the muggle appliances he remembered from his visit in 1979. The tiles here were grotty and not just worn, as he recalled, and the sink looked like something had died in the pipes underneath. There was a leak in the ceiling of the wall facing the tiny, enclosed backyard, evidenced by the trail of rust discoloration on the faded wallpaper. The cupboards were empty and populated by a nesting spider and the remains of the insects she’d trapped and eaten in the silk of her copious webs.

He checked the rooms if there was anything worth salvaging that he could use to clean himself up, but the master bedroom, if it could be called that—Sirius thought the bathrooms in Grimmauld Place, miserable as it was, had to be bigger than the squat square room he stood in—was completely empty, the bed having been sold off along with the wardrobe closet, and any other indication that Mr or Mrs Evans had lived here.

The next room was even smaller than the master room, though this one still had most of its furnishings intact: a single bed with the mattress sunken in at the middle, and stripped of any sheets, a small desk shoved to a corner, old, yellowing books and notebooks still stacked neatly on top, a tiny closet that yielded nothing but a few bent and rusted wire hangers.

This must be Lily’s sister’s room, Sirius surmised as he tugged open one of the notebooks. _Property of Petunia Evans,_ the notebook told him, and below it: _Lily, keep your sticky fingers to yourself_. He remembered a tall, lanky blond girl who’d given James the evil eye, but had stared at Sirius with undisguised interest when he’d been here in his youth. She had already moved out of the Evanses by then, he remembered Lily telling him and James, but had been called home by her parents when Lily announced she was getting engaged. She hadn’t talked to either Sirius or James at all, though she’d stared and stared at Sirius, and made him supremely uncomfortable while James and Lily spoke to Mr and Mrs Evans about their wedding plans.

Sirius remembered Petunia had news of her own back then, but whatever it had been, neither he nor James had been privy to it. He doubted whatever Petunia had to tell her family had gotten out until both wizards were long gone, so effusive were Mr and Mrs Evans over the impending wedding of their younger daughter, and so resentful had Petunia seemed.

He made to put the notebook back on the top of the stack when a few loose sheets fell out from between the pages. Puzzled, he picked it up and read it through.

It appeared to be some sort of love note from a bloke called Vernon Dursley. From the neat handwriting, the florid language, and the fine quality of the paper in his hand, this Vernon had to be a muggle of some means, if his love note contrasted sharply with the obviously cheap quality of Petunia, and indeed the Evanses’ other things. An envelope with a postmark from Surrey county fell out with the note. Sirius chewed his lip thoughtfully for a moment. He was sure Petunia Evans had gotten married, and even had a child around the same time James and Lily had been expecting Harry, but he wasn’t entirely sure if it was to this Vernon Dursley. If nothing else, though, the letter was a lead. Dursley lived in Surrey, and that narrowed Sirius’s search to a single county in England, as opposed to the entirety of the British Isles. Maybe there was more to find somewhere in this house.

Ideally, his search for Harry should have started in Scotland, in Hogwarts. Hagrid had taken Harry from his arms that terrible night in ’81 and told Sirius that he had orders from Albus Dumbledore to take the baby to him, and if anyone knew where Harry was, then it should really have been Dumbledore. But the old wizard proved not only unworthy of Sirius’s trust, considering he’d allowed Sirius to languish in prison for a decade for a crime no person in their right mind who knew the deep bond Sirius shared with James would have believed him capable of committing, he’d gone and lost Harry as well. If Dumbledore had been responsible for placing Harry with Lily’s muggle family, it shouldn’t have been too difficult to track the little boy down. But Harry hadn’t shown up at Hogwarts; he’d been missing for the last six months, hell, probably missing for the last ten years, so no, Sirius was not going knocking at Hogwarts’ gate and involving Dumbledore in his search for his godson.

He knew Lily’s room was the last door in the cramped corridor, next to the single, sorry-looking cockroach-infested closet space that was meant to be a bathroom. Lily’s room still had her bedframe, a lumpy looking mattress, and the bureau tucked against the wall. The room was only marginally bigger than Sirius’s cell in Azkaban, but even with the stale air, the utter feeling of abandonment that permeated the empty house, it was worlds better than Azkaban. Here, at least, once night fell, there would be no dementors lurking in wait for Sirius to let down his mental defenses in his sleep and feast on his unguarded psyche.

There was no light or power, and the water had been cut off. It wasn’t a far off notion that if the area had been a bit more popular, a bit denser populated, if the house didn’t sell for another year, the muggle authorities might either seize or buy off the property from Lily’s sister in order to tear the entire block down. It looked like neither muggles nor magicals remembered this godforsaken town though, and although Sirius knew he’d come here to look for signs of where Lily’s sister had moved to with his godson, he was nonetheless bone-tired from the long, arduous journey from Azkaban.

He found, in Lily’s bureau, some old, musty smelling, moth-eaten blankets that whoever had packed up the home had apparently forgotten to take, and this he took out and spread over the mattress and collapsed, face first, into the bed. He imagined for a moment, what it would have been like, growing up with a muggle family, with parents who doted on their one magical child, despite the strangeness of her existence. The Evanses, from what he remembered, were working class muggles, with flat broad accents. Lily had never hidden hers, though seven years at Hogwarts eventually polished it out to a smoother Modern RP that was more common among the many of the London-bred Purebloods and half-bloods that had been in their year. Lily had probably been happy despite being different, so unlike Sirius who’d grown up on the lap of luxury, surrounded by the most amazing and otherworldly magicks, but had been plagued by stifling expectations, and alternately cold and abusive parents. Sirius would probably never admit it—that was just how much he loved James, who was the brother, the family he had chosen, but when James and Lily had married, Sirius felt a different sort of kinship with Lily, the woman whom he’d resented at first for turning James on the straight and narrow, and who later—well. Perhaps now was not the time to think about James or Lily or Sirius betraying them both, not if he wanted to catch a quick shut-eye before he resumed his search.

He stretched on his back and stared at the stained empty ceiling. The socket in the peeling plaster where a light bulb should have been was empty, and night was falling. He closed his eyes.

If he let his thoughts wander for long enough, he thought he’d heard some sort of absolution from James and Lily for what he’d done to them, and that was perhaps a first since the time his two greatest friends in the world had died as a result of Sirius’s foolishness.

“James, Lily,” he whispered soundlessly into the dark, still house. “I’ll find him, that I can promise you, if nothing else.”

He slept that night, and there were no dreams or dementors or any need to seek refuge in Padfoot to silence his thoughts, long enough for him to rest.

* * *

Dr R A White was a liar, Harry surmised as he hunkered in his cupboard miserably, once again having been smacked around the back of his head and sent in with no supper after Aunt Petunia gave Uncle Vernon a rundown of Harry’s conversation with White. As it turned out, they hadn’t been private at all, since Aunt Petunia could recite the blow by blow of Dr White’s words to Harry. He shut his eyes against the tightness in his throat and the threatening onslaught of tears. He wasn’t going to cry because the guidance counselor in his awful school was a liar, or that he got hit because of him. Harry hadn’t cried since he was nine and Piers Polkiss had taunted him that only little girls cried.

Anyway, tears weren’t going to take the throbbing in the back of his head away. He had a lump the size of Big Ben where Uncle Vernon had smacked him, and he wondered for a moment if his conversation with Dr White had maybe been some sort of hallucination, like how Aunt Petunia had told that teacher from Harry’s primary school that Hagrid was an imaginary friend. Certainly, he couldn’t be real if he was telling Harry about all of the strangest most fantastical tales that Harry most definitely _knew_ resided only in his head and not in the dreary reality of his life in Surrey with the Dursleys.

“Yes,” Dr White had told him quietly after a lengthy silence in which he’d stared at Harry with those unnerving eyes of his that made Harry’s skin feel like it was going to turn inside out with how intensely he stared. “Have you ever wondered, Harry, what those things you say you dreamed about actually mean?”

Harry looked up at the doctor, his eyes sharpening for any sign that White was simply playing him for information. Wasn’t that how these doctors who specialized in dealing with problem children operated? They’d draw you into their confidence, make you trust them, make you tell them about Things That Have Happened, and before you know it, you were confessing your darkest secrets and the worst of your misdeeds. Well, Harry wasn’t going to be drawn into that.

“They’re just dreams, sir,” he said flatly. “My primary school teacher told me I have an overactive imagination.”

Dr White pursed his lips, as if Harry’s answer frustrated him. “But don’t you wonder where these dreams come from? That they’re so vivid you can remember them after you wake up? Do you know that most people do not even remember that they’ve dreamt anything after the first moments when their conscious minds take over upon waking up?”

Harry scowled. “I’m not lying, sir.” Technically, he wasn’t. Those things he Saw, they were basically dreams anyway, since he’d fall away from his consciousness of the reality of his cupboard whenever he’d See them. Madam Lee, the guidance counselor in his primary school, told him that it was good to cultivate his imagination, and really, that was all he was doing, maybe all he was capable of doing that he’d convinced himself they were real.

Well, his being in a cupboard now told him he truly simply had an overactive imagination, didn’t it?

Dr White had given him a look of infinite pity that Harry wanted to grab the cup of tea he’d been served by Aunt Petunia and hurl it at him. “Don’t you wonder though how it is I know, how I even have a photograph, of people and places that you’ve only dreamed about?” He handed Harry the photograph and Harry squinted at the seven young people in the picture.

“Here,” Dr White said quietly, pointing at the young woman with a bright-eyed look about her, the one with the red hair that Harry had found striking when he first glimpsed the picture. “I don’t have many pictures of her, but this is your mother.”

Harry stared at the girl in the photo. The image should have been too small for Harry to see any minute details of what the girl looked like, since fitting eight people in a 4x6 photo meant a sacrifice in detail as the camera would have had to be zoomed out, but even with his terrible eyesight, he could make out that she had a smatter of freckles about her pert, slightly upturned nose, which Harry could objectively agree that he too somewhat had. Her eyes were green and bright and doe-shaped, definitely very similar to Harry’s own, but he could see no other similarities with her, beyond that. Her face was happy, and she looked like she was having the time of her life.

“We weren’t close, your mother and I,” Dr White said. “She and your father were a year ahead of me in school, and we were sorted in different houses.”

Harry scowled at him. He really ought not to have written about Hogwarts in his English classwork, if this crazy man was going to take stuff from his stories and pretend they were real.

“Are you going to tell me she went to Gryffindor, with my dad?”

White stared at him, speechless for a moment, before he nodded. “Yes, yes, she did.” He cleared his throat. “Your, uh, dad.” He pointed at a tall thin boy with jet back hair that looked like it had never seen a comb in his entire young life. He had deeply tan skin, a long straight nose, and a sharp square jaw that Harry was certain looked nothing like his own. The round frames of his spectacles were reflected by the mischievous glint of his wide smile.

Harry thought Dr White was absolutely barmy. That boy looked nothing like Harry, and hadn’t it been White who’d told him he looked exactly like his father? “Which one of these is you?”

Dr White pointed at one of the two boys he’d noticed earlier, a thin dark-haired boy with a serious face that had Dr White’s neatly styled black cowlick, a fine-boned face and sharp chin. Next to him, the other boy who looked almost a replica of young White save for the long, wavy hair and deeply etched frown between his thick black brows drew Harry’s attention.

“Who’s this?”

White fidgeted, the first time Harry had seen that he actually looked uncomfortable. “That’s my brother. He was your father’s best friend, and I should guess, must be your godfather, if he and your father had not fallen out before your parents died.”

“I’ve never met him,” Harry said, still staring at the long-haired boy. There was something infinitely familiar about him that Harry couldn’t quite place. “I’ve lived with Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon for as long as I can remember.”

Dr White pursed his lips again, his spindly hands coming up and then he forced them back down in an aborted gesture. “I don’t know what happened to my brother, unfortunately, or whether or not he was with your parents when they died. We… hadn’t kept in contact after he and your parents finished school.”

“Hmm,” said Harry quietly, handing the photograph back to Dr White. “Doesn’t prove that whatever I’d written about was real, sir. I told you, it was just a dream.”

Dr White shook his head vigorously. “It can’t have been, I—“

And it was at that moment that Aunt Petunia burst into the dining room and told Dr White that it was lunch time and unfortunately, she had only prepared enough for the three people who actually lived in her house plus Piers, and Dr White could resume his meeting with Harry when Harry went back to school on Monday, and that he should send a permission slip the next time he was keeping Harry in school later than he should have been.

Dr White had stood politely, cleaned up his things and helped Harry put the tea things into the sink. He’d gone to the door and thanked Aunt Petunia for her hospitality. Aunt Petunia had sent Harry, Dudley and Piers into the kitchen to wash their hands, but Harry had lingered at the threshold of the sitting room and the dining room to eavesdrop.

“How can you treat him like that, Mrs Dursley?” Dr White had asked Aunt Petunia, the tone of his voice tight and controlled and nothing at all like the mild, clear voice with which he’d talked to Harry. “Why is he not at Hogwarts? Where did his letter go? Do you see the bruise on his face? Have you been hitting him? I do not know what idiot branch of the ministry sent that boy to live here, but he should have been with his _real_ family, and not you… pathetic muggles.”

Aunt Petunia looked utterly affronted as she demanded Dr White to remove himself from her house. “I’ll have nothing of you freaks with that boy! I’ve told your headmaster as much, and nothing will change my mind. His parents are dead, and you ungrateful creatures shove their progeny off at upstanding citizens like my family, like we are some halfway house for your abandoned little freaks, and then you have the audacity to lie to my face and pretend you have an upstanding normal job, when everyone knows that freaks like you do nothing but wave those sticks about and pretend to be useful! Get out of my house! Your kind are not welcome here, not after what your kind has done to my sister!”

Dr White’s face had paled so much at Aunt Petunia’s tirade that Harry, even with his eyesight and even from a distance, could see the tracery of blue veins on his forehead and jaw. “What happened to your sister has very little to do with that child! I’ll come back here for him, you vile woman. Mother was right, Sirius is a fool for trusting that you people would treat a child, one you’re related to no less, with the love and nurturing he deserves. I do not know why that child is not at Hogwarts, like his parents undoubtedly willed him to be, but mark my words, I’ll come back here with the full might of the noble and most ancient House of Black, and I will raze the ground upon which this house stands and salt the earth so your vileness shall nevermore look upon the blood of my blood.” He straightened and put his hat on brusquely, his walking stick firmly in one hand, the keys to his shiny, boxy car in the other.

“You’ve no say of that boy’s life,” Aunt Petunia hissed back. “Your kind has relinquished your right to that boy after that headmaster of yours dumped him at my doorstep like rubbish, and if I choose to treat him how your kind has done so far, like the freak that he is, well that’s my prerogative now, isn’t it?”

Dr White seemed to take that as a challenge, for his eyes glinted in the sunshine as he looked hatefully at Aunt Petunia. “You’ll hear back from the House of Black, Madam, and not a moment too soon.”

Harry had understood nothing of their hissed conversation and put it off his mind, until of course Aunt Petunia had told Uncle Vernon that someone posing to be from Harry’s school at come in and tried to encourage all of Harry’s sick ideas about strangeness and magic and magical boarding schools, and Uncle Vernon had smacked him about for lying to Aunt Petunia that Dr White was from his school (he hadn’t been lying! White _was_ the guidance counselor! It wasn’t Harry’s fault that White was also under some crazy delusion that whatever Harry was on about with these things that he’d Seen was also true!) Then he’d shut Harry in his cupboard, locked it from the outside, and here Harry was now, utterly disgruntled with the lack of supper, his head throbbing, another massive bruise on his arm twinging where Aunt Petunia had pinched him painfully when she recovered from Dr White’s dramatic exit.

He _knew_ the things he’d Seen were real, but there was always this voice in the back of his mind that sounded suspiciously like Uncle Vernon that told him that perhaps all these Visions and Seeing things were just his way of coping with the abysmal situation he had to live with at home. Wasn’t that what his teachers from his primary school had told him? That he only had an overactive imagination? Dr White was some grade A wanker who was out to get Harry, he was sure of it. He’d read Harry’s writing from English class and had now concocted this elaborate lie of believing that his stories were real to… Harry wasn’t sure what, but he was also sure it was leading up to Something That Was Not Good.

Hogwarts was _real_ to Harry, but it couldn’t be real for anyone else, not that, not any of Harry’s friends in Hogwarts, like Ron and Hermione and Hagrid, and certainly not magic. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had made sure to drill it into Harry’s head that even now, he automatically winced at phantom pain of where he’d been smacked in the face at even the thought of magic. It wasn’t real for anyone, else, he was sure of it. After all, it was all in Harry’s head, wasn’t it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did Regulus give the final twist away? I was pretty heavy-handed with the hints now.


	5. Homecoming

Phantom faces at the windows  
Phantom shadows on the floor  
Empty chairs at empty tables  
Where my friends will meet no more

From _Empty Chairs at Empty Tables, Les Miserables_

* * *

It was, perhaps, his most daft idea yet. He couldn’t regret his escape from Azkaban, for a life in that dark fortress, languishing in his grisly memories of James’s pale, dead face, Lily’s cold, empty eyes, of death and destruction all around, the utterly resigned expression on Remus’s face when Sirius had whispered to James that he suspected Remus of turning traitor out of a desire to just flee the escalating conflict among magical Britain and hide out with the werewolves, was no way to live at all, not when Harry needed him. Harry was missing and no one, not even the vaunted Albus Dumbledore had found him, though the wizard had been the one to hide Harry away in the first place.

And through it all, the conviction that he was innocent, that he did not deserve the hand he’d been dealt, distrusted and feared and vilified by the very people he’d sought to protect in joining the Order of the Phoenix, and the sinking, maddening feeling of betrayal as he realized that Peter had played them all. It had been Peter all along, friendly, unassuming, utterly unremarkable Peter, whom James had treated like a brother, and Sirius had patiently taught how to transform into his Animagus form when it was clear the bumbling fourth member of their friend group wasn’t going to make it in time for Remus’s first full moon in fifth year, when James and Sirius had achieved their Animagus forms, Peter whom Lily had quietly reassured in the kitchen of the Potters’ cottage in Godric’s Hollow, the same cottage that had been destroyed by Peter’s betrayal—Sirius didn’t deserve any of it.

And so he fled.

He hadn’t once looked back, stopped to take a breath to decide if breaking out of a prison long considered inescapable, impregnable, and utterly hopeless, was perhaps not the sign of a truly innocent man. Sirius had rationalized then that maybe he wasn’t truly innocent—who was, after all, in the powder keg of magical Britain at war with itself in the 1970s.

He refused to dwell on his personal betrayals, thoughtless acts of irrational anger and mistrust, fueled by prejudice long burned into his bones by the might of his mother’s wand… when he’d turned a fully transformed Moony on Snape, when he’d told his snitching little brother that Grimmauld Place was never his home and left the little wretch crying on the floor of his old childhood bedroom to find a family that would love him, when he’d told James that he’d heard Peter mentioning to Dorcas that Remus hadn’t checked in to Headquarters for months on end, when he’d been black out drunk, hallucinating with grief after Marlene’s death, and stumbled in search of Gideon and found Lily instead—no.

Lily had told him to make his peace with that; they’d both been at fault that night, and James didn’t have to know, and though the lie ate at Sirius’s very soul, James had never found out, and Sirius would live with all of these petty, thoughtless betrayals, because they had never been the ones that truly condemned him to eternal hellfire and brimstone like the one that Peter had done to his friends, the family he had chosen. He hadn’t looked back, and he wasn’t going to start now.

These thoughts ran lightning quick through his head as his eyes fluttered open and he stared for a moment, sightlessly, at the stained and peeling plaster of the ceiling of Lily’s childhood bedroom, and thought to himself, _There’s nothing else to find here._

The letter to Petunia Evans that he’d found the night before was as close as he was going to get. There would be information to find elsewhere that would point him to where Lily’s damnable sister had taken his godson, but it wasn’t here in the Evans family home in Cokeworth. Surrey, the one clue he’d found, was good but not nearly good enough, and Sirius knew there was something else, somewhere else that he needed to be right at that moment.

It had felt, as he lay there, gulping in the stale air for a moment, the remnants of a nightmare of dementors and James’s face alternately lax and expressionless in death and brimming with hatred for everything that Sirius had done that he’d never once had the bollocks to admit to James’s face when his chosen brother had been alive, fading into the graying dawn that seeped through the gaps of the boarded up window in Lily’s bedroom, like a metaphorical kick in the arse. Perhaps there were ghosts here in this house that were screaming at Sirius to leave. Perhaps he was just going mad, from ten years in that godforsaken prison. Perhaps James, in his death, had absolved Sirius of his sins, and decided to give him a nudge in the right direction.

He wasn’t sure what it was entirely that gave his tired, battered, malnourished body the energy to drag himself to his feet. He set about to erase his presence from the house, neatly folding the old blanket he’d found and storing it back quietly into the bottom shelf of Lily’s bureau, the same way he’d done the morning he’d woken and realized his mad efforts to drown his grief over a friend’s death had led him to the sort of unforgivable infidelity only one not entirely in control of their faculties could commit. Then, he’d gotten up too, utterly horrified by what he’d done, and quietly folded the crumpled sheets too, all the while silently breaking down inside while Lily lectured him in that stern Prefect’s voice that he thought he’d be shot of finally after they’d all left Hogwarts. It was a mistake, she’d told him, but one she knew his friendship with James would never survive, and that was how he’d allowed her to bulldoze through his convictions and keep the one thing that he knew would utterly destroy his best mate, whom he loved more than he loved himself, a secret he would never breathe to another living being ever again.

 _They’re dead now and the best you can do for them is pick up the pieces_ , he told himself as he left the sanctuary of Lily’s childhood bedroom. Yes, what else was there left to do but pick up the pieces after he’d not only spectacularly fucked up his own life, but caused the deaths of the man he’d loved as a brother since he was a child, and the woman he’d come to recognize as a sis—he really shouldn’t go there.

The house remained as still and empty as he’d found it the day before. Meticulously, he retraced his steps around the house, checking to see for any signs that there might have been someone who’d broken into the abandoned home. Petunia’s notebook was stacked neatly back on top of her old school books, the letter tucked unobtrusively between the yellowing pages. He kept the envelope, though. If nothing else, he might be able to ask in the neighborhood, where this Dursley fellow had moved to, if he no longer lived in the same location.

He was about to transform back into Padfoot to exit the house and leave it to the mercies of termites and muggle housing authorities, when the pant leg of his stolen too loose trousers got caught on the heretofore unnoticed protruding door of the cupboard beneath the stairs that led up to the bedrooms. The carpentry work of the stairs were unpolished, and the wood made rougher with the attack of woodworms, and as he tugged his leg free, the cupboard door creaked open.

The air that wafted out was even staler than the air in the house. There was a definitive note of dead rat in the stench, but Sirius crouched down anyway. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find there. The cupboard was filled with rusted cans of dried paint, old carpentry tools that would probably crumble to dust if he touched them, and curiously, a single length of polished ash wood, twelve and a half inches, its tip chipped to a point sharp enough to break skin.

Sirius stared at the wand for a long moment.

This wasn’t Lily’s wand, he knew. He’d been the first person at Godric’s Hollow, when the Fidelius, and the Potters, fell, and Lily had her wand with her, useless though it had been for her to be holding it. She hadn’t been a match for Voldemort, anyway. James would never have left his wand in a foreign home, and anyway, Sirius had also seen that unassuming strip of mahogany lying around in the rubble in Godric’s Hollow. He was certain there were no other magical people in the household; Lily had been proud of being muggleborn.

Although… Sirius wracked his memory. She’d mentioned something about her sister, one night before she and James had been married and James had lived in the spare bedroom in Sirius’s leaky Harlesden flat. They’d been waiting for Remus, the third permanent fixture in the flat, to come home from the beginnings of his first secretive missions. That had been around the time when Sirius had first heard his brother, the one he actually shared his hated parents with, had gone missing. He hadn’t known that Regulus was dead at the time, and had spent the evening burying his fears that the brother whom his parents had touted as the _true_ Black family heir may have been killed for trying to leave the Death Eaters, by griping about what a terrible person Regulus had been.

(Objectively, he was. Sirius would never have run away from home the way he had, with nothing but the clothes behind his back and his wand in hand, his face swelling with welts from his father’s stinging hexes, and his back lacerated with cuts from his mother’s vicious cutting curses, if Regulus hadn’t snitched that he’d seen Sirius trying to kiss James, the time Gryffindor had won the Quidditch Cup in their fifth year. Walburga Black had not been pleased that her rebellious blood traitor-befriending, muggle-loving Gryffindor son was queer on top of everything else and Sirius had never forgiven Regulus of his crime, even though the words had more than likely been coerced out of his little brother’s mouth at the tip of their mother’s wand.)

James had never been able to truly relate to Sirius’s complicated love-hate feelings for his little brother, but Lily had commiserated and offered up a story of her childhood, when Petunia had been jealous of her magic and her admittance to Hogwarts, and had written to Dumbledore asking for admittance, even though she was a muggle.

Could that mean that Petunia Evans had gone so far as to buy herself the same tools and supplies Lily had had to get in first year? Why else would a wand be hiding here, unused and forgotten, dumped among the other obviously unused tools that the Evans family kept? How had she even managed to buy this from Ollivander if she didn’t have any magic in her?

It didn’t matter either way now, as Sirius grabbed the wand, fascinated by the thrill of finally holding one once again after ten long years of being deprived of the tools of magic in Azkaban. He felt a frisson of power course up his left hand, his wand hand, as the ash wood acknowledged and acclimated to his own internal magic, and he closed his eyes for a moment and stretched out his senses to attune himself to the wand and its core.

 _Curious_ , he thought as he stared at the wand in his hand. He could feel its magic accept him as its owner. The wand had never been handled by a previous owner. The core was unfamiliar to him, and that was even more curious than the increasingly highly improbable fact that this wand had been purchased by Petunia Evans. In the House of Black, Sirius had handled more arcane wands than perhaps had been normal for a boy who hadn’t entered Hogwarts yet. His grandfather, Arcturus Black, had been convinced at the time that the heir to the House of Black needed a wand handled by his noble forefathers. Sirius’s old wand, the one the Ministry had taken from him when he’d been arrested in the wake of Peter’s betrayal had been one from the family vaults—the owner, his great grandfather and namesake, Sirius Black II, and that wand had been a Gregorovitch creation, with a Horned Serpent core. The core in the wand he held now was something he’d never encountered before, and if he wasn’t on the run, he’d have been curious enough to Apparate directly to Diagon Alley and demand Ollivander to examine this most curious artifact he’d found.

Didn’t matter now though, because he had more important things to deal with. The wand appeared to acquiesce to his ownership and that was more than enough.

With a quick wordless swish, the rickety cupboard door was closed. Another wave and any further signs of Sirius’s presence in the house had been erased as if he had never been there at all.

He took one last look at the empty, abandoned house that had become a momentary resting place for him to get his bearings with what truly mattered in his life now. He had to move past the fugue of his best mate’s death, the torment of betrayals long past. There was nothing he could do for James now, however much Sirius loved him, however much he craved his forgiveness.

The only thing he could do was find James’s son and make sure the boy was sent to Hogwarts, where he belonged, where he would be loved, like Sirius himself had found love and belonging in the company of a messy-haired boy with the round spectacles. And Sirius would do it. He’d do it if it killed him. That was the only fitting atonement for the crime he’d committed against James, the crime he’d been complicit with Lily.

He closed his eyes and Apparated.

He wasn’t sure how the sight of his destination would affect him but the destroyed front of the Potter cottage in Godric’s Hollow now decayed with the years it had been left in its ruined state felt like a physical punch in the gut and Sirius felt himself recoil, both with the disorientation that Apparition always brought about, as well the uncomfortable swell of memories that threatened to crowd through his rational mind, and he had to pause for a moment, leaning against the low pillars that attached to the small gate to catch his breath. The site of his best friend’s murder, looking like the exact same sordid memory that replayed in his head in a mindless torment thanks to the dementors in Azkaban threatened to completely bring him under.

He was lucky there was still perhaps a half hour to sunrise and the streets were empty.

Wrenching the riot of his emotions under control long enough for him to transform into Padfoot, so he wouldn’t be spotted by the magical folk who lived in Godric’s Hollow took massive effort, and even with the limited perception of Padfoot’s dichromatic vision, the assault to his senses of the overwhelming feel of magical residue that permeated the Potter residence nearly caused the black dog to collapse as he crossed the gate’s threshold.

The garden was completely overgrown. Weeds and wildflowers tangled with the riotous, overgrown tulips from Lily’s flower garden. The wisteria vines which James had once artfully magicked to frame the front door twined with rampant growths of dittany, moly and aconite. It was an effort for Padfoot to wend his way to the front door, which was ajar. Padfoot entered with trepidation, fearful that the overwhelming smell of magic that lingered years after the deaths of its inhabitants masked darker notes of tracking and alerting charms that may have been placed to preserve the cottage and prevent looters from stealing from the Potters.

Like the Evans home, however, the Potter Cottage was silent with the air of having been completely abandoned to the elements since that fateful night ten years ago on All Hallows Eve. Sirius didn’t dare transform back until he was safely ensconced in the cottage and unable to smell the telltale sour tang of monitoring charms.

The house looked even worse from the inside.

There was no blood, of course. Voldemort had gone straight for the Killing Curse, without giving James much of a chance to defend himself. He’d found his best friend’s body fallen where he’d stood when the Fidelius had collapsed. It had been a late night, Sirius remembered. James had already been in his pyjamas, ready to turn in with his wife and child, when he and Lily had felt all the protective magicks of their house fall.

Sirius couldn’t bear to look at the dusty chintz sofa, the cushy velvet-upholstered armchair that was like James’s throne in his little kingdom, where he’d used to sit and regale his friends with stories of his and Lily’s daring missions for the Order, before Lily had fallen pregnant. The Persian carpet in the living room that had been one of the heirloom wedding presents Mr and Mrs Potter had given their son on his wedding was horribly stained with crushed concrete and dust. The teak coffee table listed, one leg broken from the ceiling caving in on that portion of the house.

The kitchen was intact, though just barely. Voldemort had anticipated James would have a shield ready and had blasted into the cottage with a _Reducto_. James hadn’t; the surprise of the Fidelius falling, the unbearable thought that one of his best friends from a golden idyllic childhood had betrayed him, too large of a shock for wonderful, trusting, loving James Potter. He hadn’t even been holding his wand—it had been in the kitchen, though Sirius found it was no longer there. Perhaps the wands had been collected by the investigating Aurors who came upon the scene after Sirius had left to hunt Peter.

A quick check indicated there was nothing that could point him in the right direction of his search for Harry down here, though Sirius had been utterly delighted to discover that the plumbing still worked and he’d shoved his face under the sink for long moments to slake his thirst, before moving on upstairs.

The part of the landing that led to Harry’s nursery had completely caved in, though the floor had still been intact when Sirius had last been here. That had been where he’d found Lily’s crumpled form, in front of Harry’s bed, tenacious until the end in her desire to protect her child. Sirius didn’t dare look into the nursery any longer. He’d nearly done himself in even getting into the house. He wasn’t sure he wouldn’t just… fade away from grief if he looked into the site where Voldemort had attempted to kill his godson.

There were two other rooms on the second floor. First and on the far corner of the corridor landing, the guest room that he’d commandeered for himself when James moved out of their Harlesden flat and Sirius ended up spending more time at the Potter Cottage than he did his own house. That had been especially true when Harry was born and James needed an extra wand in the house to help him cope with a wife exhausted from childbirth, a fussy baby constantly crying for his mother, and the efforts of keeping house and maintaining the magical protections the house had before the Fidelius.

Even in the middle of the war, with the death and destruction that hung about magical Britain, it had been a golden time for the two best friends, with James seeing to Harry and Lily’s needs, and Sirius working the magic that kept the house and the inhabitants he loved more than life itself protected. In the evenings and early mornings of those few glorious weeks, while Lily and Harry still slept, and there were no dishes to be washed, no diapers to be laundered or clothes mended, James and Sirius had relived the bright, golden days of their time in Hogwarts, or talked late into the night of their hopes and dreams for James’s small family, of James’s hopes to get into professional Quidditch once the war ended, and Sirius’s steadfast conviction that he would be there, standing behind his best friend, the pillar of support James would need to help him manage a demanding career against the needs of his growing family. Lily had jokingly complained a few times during that time that marrying James had felt a bit like having to marry Sirius as well, for the two had been inseparable, though she’d done so usually out of Sirius’s earshot, likely remembering the time neither she nor Sirius spoke since the incident happened.

Sirius had nearly completely forgotten about those days, robbed as he was of all the warmth and happiness of those halcyon memories of old by his years in Azkaban, and they came rushing at him now, no longer as picturesque and ideal, tinged with loss and bitterness and tasting like ash in his mouth as they mingled with memories of the Potters’ deaths, and with his private betrayals of the man he considered the single most important figure around which he’d centered his young life.

Sirius hadn’t stayed when the Fidelius was cast. He’d needed to maintain the facade of being the Potters’ Secret Keeper, so as to draw attention away from Peter, but nothing much had changed in this room. The bed was unmade, because young Sirius had been a bit of a slob and James had fondly teased him that his princely tendencies about his room contrasted starkly against Sirius’s surprising skill in the kitchen, whenever he took over mess duty for James to keep the little Potter family fed. He found one of James’s old snitches, the ones he used to play with so often to cope with all the nervous energy that brimmed overexcited in his veins, on the teak desk tucked in front of the window. The magic of the snitch had long since faded, but Sirius couldn’t keep himself from reaching for it, and pressing the cold metal body of the snitch to his lips.

“James,” he whispered, his voice raspy from disuse.

The name seemed to breathe magic back into the toy and the wings fluttered against his fingers weakly for a moment before dying down into stillness once again. Sirius shut his eyes against the onslaught of tears that streaked down his gaunt cheeks. He knew it had been his magic that had animated the snitch, but he couldn’t help but feel it as a gentle caress of James’s lingering presence in the snitch. He wished it were possible for him to breathe magic back into the toy completely and just use it to—he wasn’t even sure what. Talk to James from beyond the grave perhaps. Confess that Sirius had committed a grave, unforgivable sin, two of them even, for foolishly trusting Peter surely had to be something James never would have forgiven him for, when he’d been adamant that Sirius should have been their Secret Keeper from the get go.

He left the snitch back in that forgotten bedroom from a different lifetime and moved on.

The only room left was the master bedroom, and as it shared a wall with where the Killing Curse Voldemort cast at Harry had reverberated back at him, the master bedroom was little more than a pile of rubble strewn with broken furniture. Bits of concrete and stone had blasted through the wardrobe and nearly collapsed it in, leaving splinters of wood strewn everywhere. The wardrobe contents, the couple’s clothing and robes fell about a crumpled heap among a minor treasure trove of James and Lily’s treasured things: an old Gryffindor scarf with Sirius’s initials stitched into the warm wool, Sirius’s parting gift to his best mate when James had moved out of the Harlesden flat, Lily’s lucky quill that she used in every written exam they’d ever taken in Hogwarts, a wool newspaper cap that Remus had once lent James that first Hogsmeade weekend in the winter of seventh year when James had been so delighted that Lily had agreed to go out with him on a date that he’d forgotten much of his winterwear (Sirius’s scarf and Peter’s favorite gloves had completed the look then, and those were here too).

Sirius could barely sift through them through his tears. He vaguely registered splinters of wood embedding and cutting the taut, grimy skin of his trembling hands as he took the scarf, cast a quick cleaning charm on it before winding it around his neck. It would be useful later when he needed to hide his face. He wanted to believe that the scarf still vaguely smelled like James even though that was mostly just wishful thinking on his part, and he was ready to turn away when he found what he was looking for.

There, buried under the pile of rumpled clothes and trinkets was a photograph, eerie in the stillness of the image in the glossy white paper frame. It was of a thin blond woman with an unusually long neck.She had a stiff, mean look about her bony, horsey face, but if Sirius squinted, he could perhaps see the resemblance to James’s beautiful young wife. Standing next to her, a massively built, beefy dark-haired man with a large purple face. The woman was heavily pregnant, and the couple stood in front of a generic looking detached house that appeared utterly unremarkable save for the obsessively manicured looking gardens, and the ordinary looking white metal letter box at the forefront of the photo next to the woman. At the back of the photo, the neat handwriting conveyed a single, terse message to its recipient:

_Do not contact me again._

_Yours, Petunia Dursley._

Sirius sniffled for a moment, dragging a filthy hand across his face to wipe away tears and snot and stared back at the idyllic picture the woman and the man made in stark contrast with the curt message on the back, and then he squinted. The photo quality was not nearly good enough to determine the full address but Sirius only needed the one tiny detail he could make out from the letter box: Privet Drive.

* * *

He came in the dead of a still, black night*; the artificial lights that muggles used to brighten their city streets fizzled dead from a massive engineering error caused by oversights in the technological wonder that the muggles called electricity. The square in which he’d Apparated was empty, littered with refuse, the concrete street grimy, and smelling of the refuse of human civilization. Massive blocks of muggle townhouses blotted out the stars overhead with the monstrously hulking residential brownstone buildings. There was no moon tonight to illuminate the London streets, and cars had abandoned this area of Islington, where the neighborhood had gone to seed. There was no need to take his car tonight, for the place he sought demanded no remnant of the muggle life he’d led since he’d last been through its doors.

The man who walked the dark streets now did so rapidly despite the limp in his gait. He leaned against the ebony walking stick that had been the crutch for his existence for the last twelve odd years, and though he saw not where he trod, he had no need of illumination. He knew where he was going. He had walked the streets of this in his mind for long years, some of which he hadn’t even known his real name, and yet he knew the place. The smell of it, the feel of it in his bones—muggle and magic older than the brick foundations of the very house he sought.

 _Hidden in plain sight_ , his grandfather had once told him and his brother. _A travesty_ , his mother had called it, though not with enough venom that she would uproot the family from the house that her forefathers had built.

The numbers of each house passed him by, like old memories fluttering in the still night air. Somewhere in the distance, a car honked, the sound of a cat yowling at the absence of the moon. Once upon a time, Grimmauld Place had been an upscale neighborhood in the boroughs of Islington. Such massive changes in so few years were perhaps a reflection of the vagaries of the life of the man who walked them.

He stopped precisely between two unremarkable townhouses, number 11 and number 13. In his youth, his brother had joked about hearing the neighbors talk about the missing house in between. _A mistake in numbering,_ the muggles had said dismissively. The housing authorities had them in old neighborhoods such as this. And once the neighborhood had degenerated into the ugly, refuse-littered dump that it was now, the muggle housing authorities had ceased to care.

Perhaps, if they’d had the gleam of magic in their eyes, the blue nobility of blood in their veins they would see what he saw now, as magic of centuries past took hold, recognizing one of their own, flesh of their flesh, and blood of their blood. The shifting of number 11 and number 13 happened soundlessly, seamlessly, for the magic of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black was beyond elegant, it was masterful. And it recognized one of its masters, its wayward son, gone missing, presumed dead for years.

It had called to him, the house did. Even in the murky days when he knew not who he was, his body broken, his face disfigured, his hands, legs, feet and torso irreversibly scarred by horrors that bore no repeating, the lure of the house called to his blood as he’d lain, unknown, unnamed, and forgotten in the muggle hospital in Yorkshire for years. When he’d recovered enough of his physical strength, he’d been bereft of his magic for an even more interminable length of months. Months that he’d used familiarizing himself with the muggle world of the hospital. Months he’d used unconsciously honing magic in his veins that he never even realized he had been using on the unsuspecting doctor whose life he’d stolen and later took over.

With the return of magic came the deluge of memory, and still he had not returned. There were too many skeletons in his past that he wished dead, buried and gone. Magical Britain had forgotten he existed, and he wished nothing more than to forget that magical Britain exists as well. He hadn’t counted on seeing that small boy with the bright green eyes showing up in the muggle school where he’d decided to fashion himself a new life, that boy whose own magic sparked and called to the one he had flowing in his veins.

 _The truth of Nature’s Nobility,_ his father had once lectured when he was very young, _is that you will recognize another of your own, even when you think the House of Black has forsaken you, the nobility of your blood will always bring you home_.

He wished it hadn’t, wished with all his might for the past half year that he’d never seen Harry Potter walk the halls of St Brutus’s Academy for Troubled Youths, that he had never laid eyes on the boy that looked so like his father. The boy who had looked so much like the brother he had lost. The sight of him had triggered the deluge of doubt in the place he’d carved for himself in this strange, new muggle world. The questions had started. What had happened in magical Britain since he’d been gone? What of his mother? His father, and uncles and cousins? Where was his brother?

Harry Potter’s blank face had stared accusingly at him when he’d first met the boy days ago in his office.

 _Do you see me?_ That face had asked mockingly. _Do you see what your inaction has done? A Black by blood but not by name, haunting halls of muggle schools instead of learning the arcane at the laps of true masters._

He closed his eyes for a moment, willing the memory of Harry Potter’s face away. He’d vowed to himself that he would help this boy, but to help him he needed to return to magical Britain, and learn what had happened to the boy’s father, to his estranged brother. He didn’t even know if the war had been won, if perhaps this boy grew up with abhorrent muggles was due to the fact that his brother had perished in the years he’d been gone. That would be just like Sirius, wouldn’t it? Knocking up a mudblood—someone else’s wife, no less, and then going off to die in a war. Typical.

No, he couldn’t let emotion cloud his judgment now. Harry needed him, even though the boy had been steadfast in his refusal of his assistance, and to help Harry, he needed to find his brother, he needed to find out _what_ had happened to his brother. And that meant… that meant coming home.

He took the worn stairs leading up to the battered-looking ancient cherrywood door. He had no need to touch the silver knocker twisted in the shape of a serpent, the icon of his noble family. There were no keyholes or handles, but the door to the House of Black recognized its master as he pressed a cool palm against the wood, and it creaked open.

Regulus Black passed through the threshold, the artifice and glamour of his assumed muggle identity of Archie White falling away as he let the magic of his forefathers wash over him, rendering him still, reverent as the door closed behind him. Cold dim light sparked and blazed to life in the crystal wall sconces that lined the shadowed hallway, the magic recognizing one of true Black blood, and welcoming him into its bosom.

He stopped and looked around him, at the gloom and neglect that he had never realized the house has fallen into in his absence.

“I am home,” he said.*

Outside, the air sizzled for a moment, before the buzz of electricity traveled through hidden cables buried beneath the stone and concrete of the London streets. _Power’s back_ , the muggles, those who were still awake in this unholy hour thought. _Must’ve been a glitch in the power grid_. A concern for the authorities to puzzle over for the next day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A stark contrast between the Black brothers returning to places they've called home. Sirius returns with torment and bitterness over his role in James's and Lily's demise, and over the unforgivable mistake he'd never confessed to his best friend. Regulus returns to Grimmauld Place with the conviction that he must take the boy he recognized to be Sirius's son and return him to his rightful place in magic, and as the Heir to the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. Both brothers have extremely complicated feelings about each other, Sirius because he believes Regulus weak-willed to stand up to their parents, and Regulus poisoned by their parents' disappointment in Sirius.
> 
> The other cat's out of the bag now too: Harry is Sirius's son from a drunken, ill-advised tryst with Lily that Sirius had never managed to bring himself to confess to James. This is why the melancholy he carries over James's death is so great, you can barely recognize him from the exuberance book-Sirius still managed to dredge up in spite of the longer years in Azkaban.
> 
> The passage for Regulus Black returning to Grimmauld Place has been adapted from the masterfully written _The Homecoming_ epilogue to _Dragons of Spring Dawning_ by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, about Raistlin, having taken up the Black Robes, coming to claim the Tower of High Sorcery in Palanthas, as the foretold Master of Past and Present. There were two lines directly lifted from that text (marked with a *) because fuck it's so extra and fits Regulus in this fic so well.
> 
> The blackout depicted in Regulus's homecoming is historically inaccurate (since this is set in March of 1992), but based on the 2003 power outage in London.
> 
> I should probably say that the Regulus Black you will find here is not the sympathetic Regulus that usually makes an appearance in most fic about him. This Regulus had no memory of what had happened to him in the cave for many years. And then once he regained his memories, he used his magic (he has a natural Legilimency talent here) to take over some unsuspecting muggle's life, and it's hinted he may have even killed that muggle to take over his life more effectively. He's ruthless and even a little conniving, stopping at nothing to gain safety for himself after he'd risked his life to stop Voldemort, and with how he'd been raised and socialized (as a Black, as a Slytherin, as a Death Eater), I thought that was a little more apt than the wilting violet Sirius portrayed in the books.


End file.
